Stories They’ll Remember
Parents are often given child-rearing advice that is proscriptive in order to discourage a child’s negative behavior (“do not lie”) instead of prescriptive in order to encourage positive behavior (“tell the truth”), and this is common in education too. Schools often list and punish behavior that is prohibited but don’t emphasize and encourage the freedom students might have in school and their studies. Teachers are bound by many rules and parents are often not candid with their children about how they developed self-control and maturity, but there is a way to help children learn and grow without turning everything into a lecture or lesson: tell them true stories about how you handled a similar situation. I came across this book review I wrote in GWS 70 that describes this technique well and I thought it might interest you. The book is available for free in the Internet Archive.
Stories They’ll Remember by Frank Lord
This gentle, modest book is only 106 pages long, but it holds a wealth of information about how you can share your values with your children by telling them stories about your own life and growing up. Unlike so many books about parenting, this book doesn’t tell you what your values should be, but instead focuses on how to use a time-honored technique for getting one’s point across without being preachy or hysterical. Of course, we are all probably going to be preachy and/or hysterical with our children at some point in our lives, and this book is not about how we can avoid these moments. What it makes clear is how, when the storm has passed or when the moment seems ripe, we can share stories about our experiences with our children and shed some light on their own dark moments by letting them know we’ve been there too and, most important, by telling them honestly how things turned out for us. In doing this we provide our children with more real choices for their future behavior.
By stories Frank Lord does not mean fiction. He means real, true-life stories, sometimes only a few sentences long, but that have relevance to a given situation. These stories can be about comfort, empathy, achievement, failure, industriousness, illness, good health; any topic, really, that allows us to reveal our past to our children in a nurturing manner.
What I like most about this book is how form and content are so neatly tied together. From the introduction on, Frank Lord makes most of his points not with expository paragraphs but with stories. This approach remind me so much of GWS, and the innumerable stories that are told in each issue. Our variety of experiences tell us, and our children tell us, that despite the generalities each of us is unique, and we need to reach and be reached by others in our own ways, so we need a multitude of stories to reach a multitude of people. Frank Lord does well to remind us that storytelling is our ancient and effective method of reaching one another, not only on the conscious level but especially on the unconscious level, and that it is a highly effective method to use with one’s family. Here is a story from the book:
When Tom was worried about Michael’s use of the family car to drive to a party clear across Chicago, or rather worried about him making it back home, he picked a time when he and his sixteen-year-old were changing the oil in the car to tell him about his own experience thirty years earlier.
“Your grandfather told me when I was about your age that if I ever had the car and got to drinking, he’d pay for a cab to bring me home. He said that we’d figure out how to get the car back the next day.
“Well, one of my friends had to get married when we were in high school and they served champagne at the wedding. His older brothers kept filling up my glass after I had taken a sip or two so I couldn’t really tell how much I’d had to drink. I figured I was okay until I walked out to the car to drive home. I was so dizzy I had a hard time even finding the car.
“After I finally located our old beat-up Chevy, I poured myself into the front seat and sat there for a long time trying to think. I finally decided I didn’t belong on the highway so I stumbled back into the church basement. Nobody from our neighborhood was still there and it was maybe two in the morning, so I found a phone and called a cab.
“Of course, when I got home I didn’t have nearly enough to pay for the taxi, so I had to go in and wake up your grandpa. It was so late I was afraid he’d be mad, but he wasn’t at all. And the next day your grandma didn’t say a word about it either.
“Dad and I borrowed a neighbor’s car and picked up the Chevy from the church parking lot, and then we went out to a pancake place for breakfast. I felt kind of dumb the next day, but I figured it was better than killing somebody—maybe me. I guess it worked out all right.
“Hey, the same offer goes for you. I’ll foot the cab bill for you to get home if you know you shouldn’t be putting that key in the ignition.”
Tom had rather painlessly fulfilled his parental responsibility of adding another choice to Michael’s unconscious store of behavioral possibilities. This adolescent is going to have a hard time getting behind the wheel after drinking, without considering the possibility of a cab.
… At another level the story promises that Tom won’t be angry if son Michael drinks too much as long as he behaves responsibly. The story neatly separates the virtually inevitable over-drinking while learning about alcohol from the quite separate issue of drunk driving.
Frank Lord gives us many good examples of stories to tell children from age four on, and suggestions for when to (and when not to) tell a story, how to choose a relevant story, how to tell it, and how to end it. On this last point, he shows his deep trust in and respect for children:
For me, the hardest part of telling children a story is knowing when to quit. The temptation to add a moral at the end of a well-old tale is sometimes overwhelming. We don’t feel the need to insult our contemporaries by explaining our stories, but that often happens when we’re dealing with children, especially our own. We’re so anxious that they “get it” we forget to end the story with a chuckle or a pensive stare into space, giving the youngsters some time to decide for themselves what the story means.
