The Power of Story Time with Children
How stories shape the next generation perspective, character building, resilience, and empathy to the world around them.
As an educator, picture story books are my breadwinner. There's magic when sitting down with a group of children who marvel at the imagery and listen attentively to every hanging word and phrase. In an inquiry school, across the year group, across the school, vertically across the years, teachers will have a stack of picture storybooks as a source and medium to convey messages and lessons to the children.
At the beginning of the school year, especially young children, the need for soothing and comfort is usually found when an adult spends time with them, reads a book with them.
If we look around the world, just taking a moment to witness young children, how many do we witness holding onto a book rather than an iPad? Have we substituted books for other forms of tablets?
Picture story books in themselves, when told and expressed with the correct expression and the right tone, create a magical adventure both for the reader and children; it's the missing magic for our ever-faster-growing modernisation of a civilisation.
Story time isn't just a sacred practice that transcends across timelines and generations, based on how messages, morals, and lessons are shared through the art of language and the art of expression. This practice helps shape and mould an individual's inner world at a young age.
Stories are powerful connectors where children connect to the world around them and their world and spiritual identity. Sharing stories with intention provides an opportunity to build character, empathy and resilience from a young age.
Window to Multiple Perspectives
Stories are a powerful tool to encourage readers and the audience's perspective-taking. With imagery, children are introduced to different characters with different backgrounds, cultures, and ways of life. Finding books with a cultural representation further emphasises the children's connection and relation to their identity while making sense of the world around them.
The protagonist is the main character, and it is usually set as a hero's journey or adventure. Following along with the story allows the children to see the world through someone else's eyes and thoughts. Allowing them to live bi-curiously through a character's lens encourages the neural plasticity of mental and emotional expansion. It enables the children to realise that their reality is only one dimension, and stories offer other possibilities of different realities and experiences.
Following along with the hero's journey, through a spiritual lens, encourages children to realise there is a shared humanity, others who may go through struggles and challenges, while realising the divine spark within beings, regardless of appearances, to push through challenges or obstacles. This gives an example of a life of determination and persistence when facing challenges.
Cultivating Empathy and Compassion
Empathy is having the ability to understand, resonate, and share a feeling with another. As a reader and audience, asking the children to listen and follow along to a story of a character that faces challenges or obstacles encourages and provokes deeper feelings within them. They began to connect to others, relate to or see situations and experiences from a different perspective.
While reading stories, they are great provocations, and the art of learning when to pause, ask reflective questions, promotes one child to think, predict, anticipate, and begin to feel an identity connected to scenarios. These experiences are fundamental to one's social-emotional learning growth.
Emotional resonance with characters in the story book provides opportunities to develop empathy. Most often, stories will have a problem and resolution, and by following along with these narratives, children begin to realise and learn that their actions also have an impact on the world around them; this is the beginning of learning about karma, along with the universal law, cause and effect, and in extension oneness.
Building Characters, Weighing Morals and Decision Making
Through time, centuries, and generations, stories have been a tool to explain and honour archetypal energy through character building. In most young children's stories, our protagonist is presented with a dilemma and must decide. These are windows of prompting that allow children to begin exploring their moral decision-making and deciding what is right and wrong. Characters in stories often face consequences from their decision-making that teach children the lessons of honesty, courage, compassion, and integrity that young learners will carry through life.
Resilience in Spirit
We face many highs and lows in life, and stories provide a safe space to confront and process these challenges. When a character in the story overcomes a fear, an obstacle, navigates through challenges, and finds their own strength after a setback, they are teaching the children the importance of resilience and that all events can be temporary, using various skills, such as collaboration, thinking, determination, and problem-solving. The moments in a story that provide tension and resolution mirror living in reality, where we also have ups and downs.
These stories allow us to discover and find our inner compass, strength, and faith, leading us to unlock and unravel their purpose during difficult times.
Energy transmission from writers and illustrators
Every story begins with a spark of creativity and imagination. The creators carry their creative energy from the writer to the illustrator's visual interpretation. Physical text is a form of transmission from the spirit. When children read, follow and engage with a story book, they receive words, images, and lessons and take on the imagination, passion and intention of the artist and readers. It is a beautiful energy exchange.
Learners can explore their creativity and promote their imagination as they visualise and create their own world-building.
The Beauty of Shared Presence
Having story time with young children is a beautiful and powerful act of pausing life, endless to-do list, distractions and mind to have a moment to spend time together while forming a connection with one another. This is a moment where the child's attention is focused on the story, and the children will feel the presence of another communicating, "you are seen, heard and valued." The shared presence deepens the relationships, where the reader holds space and energy for the child to feel safe in their inner world and expand and explore themselves, making connections, allowing their imagination to flow.
Being fully present for one another models for the child that presence and being together to have shared experiences, while giving the child. Children have a sense of belonging. Children learn from adults around them how to build connections and how loving energy flows from one to another through shared experiences.
The Inner Child: Fuelling Spiritual Exploration and Connection
Stories are children's imagination and creativity that allow them to explore different character perspectives, different worlds and sometimes an adventure or journey to magical lands and fantasy creatures, where they solve problems through the safety of a book led by an adult.
These explorations nurture the inner child of creativity and connection, opening the human consciousness to infinite possibilities. When one has a rich inner life, it fuels one's passion, courage, and connection with a spiritual journey. By nurturing their imagination, we are allowing and giving permission to young children to dream, to imagine, and to guide them in discovering their own sacred wonder and world within themselves.
Having story time can be a sacred ritual or an experience when one becomes aware of the possibilities and cultivation of young children. It is bountiful and offers endless opportunities to help one grow perspective, empathy, character, and resilience. Choosing to be intentional with the stories to share with others prepares our next generation of children to have the strength, determination and faith to face challenges in their world while serving as a guide to their inner world journey to discover their inner strength and power within.
*This article is for informational and entertainment purposes only and should not be considered professional or legal advice. The author is not responsible for any actions taken based on the information provided