Moral Truths May Be Very Effectively Conveyed by Story-Telling

       The story has moral value. Truth in an ethical statement is dead; in a story it lives, because the story shows how it has been lived by actual men and women. The confidence which the story suggests gives vital power to the child. Says Frances J. Olcott: "At story-telling time a child's mind is open to the deepest impressions. His emotions may be swayed towards good or bad. His imagination is active, making a succession of mental pictures. Through story-telling he may be taught the difference between right and wrong, and his mind stocked with beautiful mental images."

• Dad, Tell Me a Story     

       "The story," says Louise Seymour Houghton, "is particularly valuable because it makes truth attractive. I am not now referring to fact but to truth. The truth, for example, that pagans are not necessarily excluded from the household of God, is not particularly interesting to the ordinary mind. But embody it in the story of Ruth, and how beautiful, how picturesque, poetic, pathetic, dignified a truth it becomes!" 

• Reflection: Storytelling as Essential To Christian Communities

       Seumas MacManus, the famous Irish storyteller, says: "If you ask me to tell you in three words the benefits of story-telling, I will reply in ten words that besides giving the necessary mental occupation, story-telling will make the child father to a kindlier, more enthusiastic, more idealistic man than the one who is taught to scorn story-telling. . . . The story-telling nations of the world are the cheerful, social, enthusiastic, idealistic nations, and this is because story-telling to the child brings out all the better qualities - sympathy, imagination, warm-heartedness, sociability." 

• Role of Book Features in Young Children's Transfer of Information from Picture Books to Real-World Contexts

       But why tell rather than read stories? Seumas MacManus answers: "Story-telling is superior to the written story chiefly because the man who writes is not in touch with the audience. The story-teller talks to you, and has to make a story from beginning to end, and every sentence has to be a part of the story, because he is within range of a brickbat and subject to the recall at any minute." 

• The Art of Storytelling from MENSA

       And why tell children stories rather than encourage them to read them themselves? Of course we do both, but MacManus answers again: "I think story-telling is to story-reading what the eating of a meal is to reading the bill of fare. The story-reading nations of the world are the morose nations, because the reader's a selfish man who goes away into a corner with his book, becomes oblivious to the world around him, and gives back to the world nothing."

• Life Stories - How you arrange the plot points of your life into a narrative can shape who you are...

Raising Children Network.