Stories Help Children Process the Pandemic and Back to School Changes
“We’re in a bubble, right?” Joshua asked, flashing a smile as we walked back from lunch to our outdoor classroom. The kids, ages seven to ten, jostled one another along the path, excited to be back in school. Being outside makes a difference – we managed to keep in-person classes last year when most schools went virtual. This year, we’re seasoned.
“Well, sort of…” I answered, but the kids sensed hesitation in my voice. It was obvious they all, like Joshua, wanted me to confirm their feelings of safety, camaraderie, and joy. I did. I felt great. But I also knew about the shifting policies in county schools, the rising tide of the delta variant, and the varying opinions about vaccines and masks within our parent community.
We stopped at an old juniper tree with long twisting branches. These too face a disease, an infestation of bark beetles magnified by drought. But this tree, at the edge of a slope, was green and healthy, easily 350 years old. Three years prior, we had nailed a thermometer to its trunk, now part of our daily science report.
Climbing under the branches, we took our familiar posts on the ground. “Do you guys know about the Bubble Prince?” I asked. The kids smiled. Some rolled their eyes. I’ve spent years with these kids. They know my stories.
“The Bubble Prince lived in a soapy bucket left outside by a roving class of kids. It seemed like they washed their hands every fifteen minutes, but somehow, they never saw him. One day the wind blew, and he was lifted out of the bucket in a bubble that glistened like a glass rainbow. From up high, he watched the kids return from lunch. He saw adults walk out of their houses, car keys in hand. Some had on masks. Others didn’t. One guy had two masks! An old woman bent over her garden. Then he saw a woman, a nurse, who had one of those huge face shields. She must be an astronaut, he thought. But it wasn’t the nurse who was an astronaut. It was the Bubble Prince…”
“Storytelling,” says Hannah Arendt, “reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.” If you’ll bear with me, I’d like to leave the Bubble Prince hovering over the neighborhood for a moment to develop what Arendt is hinting at, a bird’s eye view into why people tell stories in the first place.
There is a lot of research available on storytelling today. It helps people focus, remember information, develop empathy, and navigate difficult life events. Good skills for our time. Stories also form the latticework of our social relationships, especially between parents, teachers, and children. This research comes from fields like neuroscience, evolution, psychology, and anthropology, but several people have begun to aggregate it into a unified theory of storytelling.
Brian Boyd, an evolutionary theorist at the University of Auckland, is one of them. In his book On the Origin of Stories, he paints an important picture of storytelling’s place in the human species. There is a reason stories attract us.
The excitement we feel when listening to a good story is like the flavor of ice cream on our tongues. It tells our bodies to pay attention, and attention is the backbone of memory. Full of calories, sugar, and fat, ice cream is one of the most nourishing foods on the planet. That’s why you feel pleasure when you taste it. You do not get the same experience chewing grass, because your body can’t digest it.
This is what storytelling does for our brains. It helps us focus on information our bodies can digest, and it’s doubly important for kids. Like ice cream, we need to be thoughtful about how much and what kinds of stories we put into our bodies. But unlike the ice cream metaphor, it’s not the content of a story that is so nourishing, but the means of delivery. Storytelling is how our brains prefer to think.
There’s good reason for this. Groups of humans have always survived better than individuals. Something needs to be the glue for those groups, a bond that keeps the social fabric together. Storytelling is one of those essential adhesives, and this is why we find it so deeply embedded in our religions, nations, and cultures.
Yuval Noah Harari, bestselling author of Sapiens, dedicates chapter two to this very point. Anatomically, Homo sapiens have been essentially the same for 150,000 years – two feet, hands, and big brains – but there was a substantial shift around 60,000 years ago when tools and societies suddenly explode with sophistication. Scientists call this the cognitive revolution, and it occurred without any obvious anatomical change, like brain size. What, Harari asks, was the substantial shift we made from ape-like primates with hands and big brains to world-explorers and technology buffs? His answer? “Fiction.”
“There have been great societies that did not use the wheel,” writes Ursula K. Le Guin, “but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.” Harari and Boyd help us understand why: “Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.” In other words, storytelling isn’t a novelty or entertainment – it is a crucial cognitive skill our ancestors evolved that allowed us to build cultures. Prior to it, we were “an animal of no significance,” as Harari puts it. Afterward, we were kings and queens.
The result is that each and every one of us inherited this skill. It is deeply rooted in your ancestry, and no matter your position in life it’s a skill you access every day. For free. Just like walking. Freedom is an important point, because the abundance of professional stories today sometimes makes us think that storytelling is a skill for experts. It’s not. That’s like believing the abundance of marathon runners is good reason to stop walking.
Because of its deep roots in our genes, brains, and cultures, storytelling is one of the best ways to bond with kids, especially when it comes to difficult subjects like the pandemic. If you’ve ever watched a child’s attention wander while explaining something obtuse, try explaining it in a story instead. It tastes more like ice cream than spinach.
Don’t mistake me to be saying that direct answers and varied experiences aren’t also important. This isn’t fairyland. Popeye already taught us about spinach. The message is just this: stories are an important part of your child’s nutrition. You are a storyteller.
You might already know how “The Bubble Prince” ends. I won’t give it away. Instead, I invite you to finish it with your own kids. Or you might choose a different story altogether. Regardless of the content, telling stories with your children (and listening to theirs) can help each of you gain insight into your unique bubble during the pandemic. But this much is certain – you will grow closer.
Photo by Note Thanun from Unsplash