Most parents are aware of the fact that reading to their children both encourages better literacy skills and creates a wonderful opportunity to spend some time bonding as a family in a quiet, loving setting. It helps parents and children alike to unwind and get away from the bright glare and constant stimulation of electronic devices prior to bedtime, ensuring that everyone in the household enjoys a sounder sleep and a better tomorrow.
The benefits of reading to one's children do not end there, however; emerging research suggests that early exposure to fictional stories facilitates the learning process in ways that are both safe and profound. Through their use of allegory, stories simulate “real life” situations, and—where children's stories are concerned—they typically do so in a simplified way, one which allows children to begin to make sense of the complex world around them.
Stories often model social situations which children may actually encounter and tackle issues that are likely to arise as they grow and develop. They can also help to disambiguate complicated themes and concepts, such as love, good versus evil, loss, and morality. Not only does this add to children's confidence, as they are more frequently faced with themes and situations for which they have already been provided a “map”, it helps children to empathize more fully with the experiences of others. This in turn leads to more solid friendships, as children are better able to listen to their peers, relate to them, and intuit their needs and wishes.
The reason why this process is so effective lies in the way fiction prompts children to use their imaginations; unlike lectures about the same concepts, which would “hand feed” the right answers to anyone listening (meaning that children wouldn't have to think as deeply about the issues at hand), fiction prompts children to assess the imaginary situations (and actions and consequences) portrayed and arrive at their own conclusions. As such, children must teach themselves their own “lessons”, and this level of active and willing engagement equates to a far more personal and memorable experience.
Stories as Social Simulations
The benefits of fiction for learning how to navigate the world in a safe way have been evident to humans from such an early period in their evolution that anthropologists believe the attraction to stories has become an inherent part of human nature. Each society which has managed to survive relatively intact over the centuries has its own stories, tales which are designed to help children learn the values of the culture around them. As unique as each of these cultures is, in reviewing their stories, one can easily see universal human truths revealed.
This is a testament to the fact that stories not only reveal truths, they also clarify them, stripping away the chaotic messiness of “real life” in order to focus our attention directly on social concepts. This allows us to experience them and think about them much more deeply, as our attention is not being continually diverted by ever-changing external stimuli. It is this effect which can make fiction seem as real, or even more real, than life.
For many imaginative people—children especially—becoming engrossed in a story is akin to being in a hyper-realistic simulation (e.g. Star Trek's holodeck simulation room). So profound is this effect that psychologists have termed it the “simulation theory” of fiction, and believe that this simulation allows us to observe models of selves in the social world in such a way that the underlying patterns and processes of social relationships become evident to us. They believe that we have evolved to use stories in this manner as it allows us to learn about social relationships without actually testing the social boundaries around us, possibly disrupting the harmony of our relationships. When one thinks of how essential group organization and cooperation were in primitive times—having food was incumbent on group hunting parties, having clothing was dependent on the whole tribe coming together to skin a large animal and prepare its hide, and so on—it is easy to see how stories were an effective tool to help ensure survival through better social relations.
This benefit is no less relevant today than it was during the last Ice Age; on the contrary, as our societies have grown larger and ever more complex, stories have become more necessary than ever. Children today are exposed to an overwhelming wealth of social stimuli, usually encountering people of many different cultures, races, and religions (if not locally, they assuredly will online), and being able to access a vast amount of information about the various issues and conflicts between these many groups around the world.
Maintaining the tradition of storytelling may therefore be key to a better tomorrow; not only do stories help to demonstrate the values of various cultures, they have been shown to encourage the development of empathy between different groups. While it is not fully understood why stories are so particularly effective at doing this (research has found they are far better at engendering inter-group empathy than, for example, documentaries containing the same information), it is believed that children putting themselves in a character's place and feeling what they would feel is excellent practice for later imagining what people around them must be going through. Likewise, the reflective nature of reading—it forces children to sit still and think, rather than being distracted with the various actions of their playmates—is thought to accentuate this effect.
Empathy both serves as the basis for morality, according to many leading psychologists, and allows us to see the world from another's point of view—helping us to overcome our innate biases and interact in a peaceful, caring way with those different to ourselves. In fact, experiments conducted in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States showed that the attitudes of white children toward black children could be radically altered for the better if the white children were told a story in which the protagonist was a black child, or if they were given a multi-racial reader and asked to read stories from it.
As such, when you read stories to your children, you are giving them the tools they need to navigate a complex world in a compassionate, knowledgeable way, while also adding to the overall level of tolerance and understanding that will be present in the next generation. The tradition of storytelling is no mere pastime—it's woven into the fabric of what makes us human beings, and continues to motivate us to grow and develop as a species, overcoming the inherent limitations of narcissism and prejudice.
Painting "Alice In Wonderland" by George Dunlop Leslie c.1879
