This Universal Children’s Day, Thursday, November 20, psychologist Peter Gray explores the power of stories to help children navigate a complex world.
What makes stories so universally attractive?
If you Google “reading to children” you will find no end of websites telling you why you should do so. Most benefits described have to do with the warmth and closeness that reading generates between you and your children; the opportunities for conversation and mutual understanding that are opened up by the stories; and the linguistic and pre-reading skills and positive attitudes toward reading that children develop when they are read to. These are all good reasons.
But a reason that is rarely touched on gets at the heart of why human beings everywhere are attracted to fiction, and why that attraction begins to appear so early: stories provide a simplified simulation world that helps us make sense of and learn to navigate our complex real world. The aspects of our real world that are usually most challenging, most crucial for us to understand, are social aspects. Knowing how to deal with evil as well as love, how to recognise others’ desires and needs, how to behave towards others so as to retain their friendship, and how to earn the respect of the larger society are among the most important skills we all must develop for a satisfying life. Stories that we like, and that our children like, are about all that. They are not explicitly about how to navigate the social world, in the way that a lecture might be. Rather, they are implicitly about it, so listeners or readers have to construct the lessons for themselves, each in his or her own way. Constructed lessons are far more powerful than those that are imparted explicitly.
Attraction to stories is basic to human nature. Historically, stories long preceded the development of writing. All human cultures have stories that are guidelines for living. Before there was writing, stories were passed along orally from generation to generation. Children hearing the stories learned about the beliefs and values of their culture. It might even be said that a culture without stories is a culture without moral direction. Stories describe the basic conflicts and dilemmas of human life and stimulate us to think about ways of resolving them. That is why initiatives such as the Nal’ibali reading-for-enjoyment campaign, working to make stories and storytelling a part of daily life, are not just good for the children hearing the stories, but for a nation’s social development as a whole.
Stories Are Simulations of Life’s Challenges and Dilemmas
Robert Lewis Stevenson, long ago, wrote this about art: “Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt, and poignant; a work of art, in comparison, is neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing, and emasculated. Life imposes by brute energy, like inarticulate thunder; art catches the ear, among the far louder noises of experience, like an air artificially made by a discreet musician.” His point was that we appreciate art – including stories – because they focus our attention on ideas or experiences abstracted away from the messiness of real life, so we can experience them and think about them more clearly.
The Canadian psychologists Keith Oatley and Raymond Mar have expanded on Stevenson’s ideas – less poetically but more scientifically – in their simulation theory of fiction. Fiction, they write, is not life, but “is a model, a useful simulation, of selves in the social world.” And, elsewhere they write, “Like other simulations (eg computer models), fictional stories are informative in that they allow for prediction and explanation while revealing the underlying processes of what is being modeled (in this case, social relationships).” They suggest that we are pre-adapted, by biological evolution, to attend to stories, especially to stories about social relationships, because stories provide a safe and efficient place for us to learn and think about such relationships.
I would describe stories as a form of play, and, as in all play, our involvement with stories is a way of acquiring skills and ideas that are valuable for negotiating the real world. When we enter into a story we enter a make-believe world where, precisely because it is make-believe and has no immediate real-world consequences, and because the events are simplified and the important ones made salient, we can experience the challenges and difficulties more clearly, think about them more rationally, and develop more insight about them, then we might from real-world experience.
Nal’ibali is a national reading-for-enjoyment campaign sparking children’s potential through storytelling and reading. For more information and tips on sharing stories with children, or to download stories in a range of SA languages, visit www.nalibali.org.
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