The Golden Chain of Reading: Telling Family Stories

What is reading without the story? The words go together so easily without thinking - Read me a story. But reading is incidental to the story, it is what you do to get to the story. The story itself is what is really desired. Without the story there is still reading, for facts, for information but it has become the body without the spirit.

Long before reading there have been stories, so many lost now to living memory or with only the dimmest of echoes, going right back to the very beginning of human communication. I am sure that it wasn't but a generation or two between stringing together the first words "Watch out! Lion!" to someone sitting around the campfire telling stories "There once was a lion…." And certainly only a further generation for big sibling to be scaring little sibling silly with stories of lions in the night sniffing out lovely smelling little children.

And so it goes in families. Want good readers? Tell good stories. Tell them early, tell them often. Reading will come as it does but the habit of listening, paying attention, following the sounds that become a story, can be formed long before the skill of reading is developed. Tell stories about your life, about your parents, about ancestors, folk stories, made-up stories, interesting vignettes from what you saw or experienced or read during the day. But tell them. Don't keep them secret.

Your stories forge a deep link that is almost impossible to understand between you and your children and the nature of the stories you tell becomes an inseparable element of themselves. The benefits of storytelling are not unilateral either. For as much as they learn and enjoy from your stories, you also are rewarded many times over. In the pleasure of the act itself, but also in the habit it forces of winnowing out the superfluous, of focusing on the essence, on how to move from factual recitation to something that grips.

And it is so easy. You don't have to stop what you are doing, you don't have to buy anything to do it, you don't even have to make more time in the day. Now there are a few things that do make it easier, but nothing that prevents anyone from telling stories.

We have always made a point of having one sit-down meal together each day, almost always dinner. It is a time when we can catch-up with one another and be together and share that most primeval of experiences, a meal and that second most primeval experience - a story. It is the time when, by the act of listening, experiencing and mimicking, the children learn the art, the give and take, the protocol, of good conversation and story-telling.

And it is fun. There is a virtual warehouse of stories we tell on ourselves collectively and which we all have of one another. They disappear for a while and then something happens to bring a story to mind and out they come.

A number of years ago when we first moved to Australia (and the children were all quite young), in the first days and weeks of adjusting to this new country with its unfamiliar customs, we would every evening sit down to dinner and share what faux pas we had committed, what we had seen that was unusual, what reactions we had elicited that were surprising, and what we had done that led to unexpected outcomes.

Sally managed to set the tone for these family debriefing/storytelling sessions, the very first evening. We had moved into a house and were still unpacking everything and had the minimum of kitchen utensils. We were tired from the twenty-four hour journey out to Australia, from the fourteen hour time zone difference, from having arrived at midnight, and from having spent the whole day unpacking. At the end of that first hectic day, Sally baldly stated "OK, I'm done. We are going to have a proper dinner."

She set off to the neighborhood grocery store, shortly returning with the ingredients for a simple spaghetti dinner and salad. Pretty soon the homey smells of dinner are wafting through the house, the kids begin to gravitate to the dining room, the table is set and we are sitting down to the first act of normalcy after this epic move. Everyone is hungry from the disrupted meal schedules and from all the exertions of exploring the garden, moving and setting up furniture, unpacking and so on. And so the first bite of the spaghetti was large and enthusiastically engulfed.

And memorable. Glances were averted as each of us adjusted to this unexpected taste sensation. For it was then that we discovered that in Australia, what is marked as tomato sauce is what we would call ketchup. Sally had fixed a very nice spaghetti sauce made from ketchup. Nothing wrong with that per se but certainly unexpected and very certainly unlikely to set some new dining trend. So one more story was added to the repertoire.

There are all manner of styles of story-telling (check out the storytelling websites mentioned in the Resources section of TTMD). It doesn't take long to find one that suits you, drama, humor, pathos - take your pick. And remember, you will never have so forgiving an audience as the very young. They have no basis of comparison to critique your style. You are the benchmark. And there is nothing so satisfying as hearing "tell it again" or "tell us the one about…"

In our family I am partial to telling stories about experiences. Things I have experienced or stories my parents and/or grandparents told me when I was young of things they experienced. I feel it provides a means of anchoring our children in values older than the present whimsies and giving them a context that they cannot have until they have lived long enough.

And in these times of busy schedules and affluence and fads, it allows them to connect with things that are so real and painful and need to be known but from which our modern circumstances shield them. Of need, of want, of death. So I tell the stories I heard from my grandmother, raised in the hardscrabble environment of the Ozarks in the early 1900s, orphaned as a young girl, village school teacher in a one room shed at sixteen, her brother scraping together the dime to buy his two sisters (separately farmed out to family and strangers) each a little vase that first Christmas after the death of their parents.

I tell these stories, not to frighten them, but to quietly remind them that though we are fortunate to live in great prosperity and freedom and liberty, life isn't necessarily always that way. Hard times may or may not be around the corner, but even if they are others before them have confronted and overcome misfortune. And with those examples and tales, I hope they are equipped to better deal with all that life will throw at them.

Knowing that the stories came from my grandmother's lips to my ears and hearing those stories from my lips to their ears builds a chain of reality that binds the lesson to them without having to suffer the experiences being related. It gives the stories a heft that can never be fully present in the letters on a page.

But what I love the most in storytelling are those stories that have a touch of humor to them, that make the kids smile or laugh. My mother, their grandmother, is a Southern lady. Proper, sweet, sentimental, but with iron fortitude and a steely pragmatism. As indulged grandkids, the latter characteristics are not so obvious to them. And so they love to hear the stories where those traits are on display. Such as the day when, living in a third-world country as we were at the time, she came out of a little local store to find four fellows baiting our Boxer dog locked up in the car. They were having a good old time taunting him and driving him into a frenzy of slobber and noise. Of course the game was good because there was no chance of him doing any harm to them, locked up as he was.

As she approached the car, their attention was turned to her with chauvinist comments bandied about in a foreign tongue, insolence approaching aggression in their manner. My mother, calmly proceeded through their picket to the car, as if they did not exist, her very ignorance of their existence somewhat taking them aback.

But they were not nearly so taken aback by that as they were by her next action. As if unaware that there was a baying, salivating eighty-pound Boxer dog that had taken on the appearance of the Hound of the Baskervilles crashing around inside the car trying to get out to address his persecutors, her hand reached out to open the car door.

And at that moment, what had all the makings of a bad situation became a good story told down through the years. It was almost a real-life rendition of one of those old Roadrunner cartoons. Where there had been four bad-guys ready to make trouble, there was a cloud of dust hanging in the air. And one Southern lady on foreign shores with an enigmatic smile of triumph. As if nothing were out of the ordinary.

Family stories are a treasure that with any luck are passed down from generation to generation. We have, in our children's literature, many wonderful instances of family story-telling. In the collection following you will find examples of family stories as narrative (Moomintrolls and The Borrowers) as well as family stories that are really a collection of vignettes told by master raconteurs (Mama's Bank Account, Cheaper by the Dozen, etc.) Particularly these latter are a pleasure to read as an adult regardless of when you read them to your children.

Picture Books