Telling stories to children allows them to acquire and refine the ability to recognize and process their experiences.
The main task of the parents is to encourage that children prepare to live their own life well, realizing themselves in the best possible ways. All their interventions must take into account this main purpose. Now, to live your life well, it is necessary (among many other things) to acquire and refine the ability to recognize one’s experiences. We adults may seem automatically. Often, therefore, we do not notice (nor do we remember) how much they are capacities that are progressively acquired and perfected. Knowing how to recognize their experiences substantially means knowing how to recognize the emotions that our experiences activate in us.
How does a child recognize his emotions (fear, anguish, sadness, anger, jealousy, tenderness …)? Like all of us, he lives directly. He has experience. But, so that his experience is recognized as real, relevant, sensible and therefore as acceptable and, above all, conceivable, the child absolutely needs to perceive that there is someone outside of him (better if he is an important person for him, as a mother or dad) who resonates with that emotion of hers, and who therefore understands and shares his experience. It is a kind of validation of emotion and experience. It is as if the child could say, between himself and himself: “The experience that is happening to me was also lived by others, who now recognize it. I can reassure me: I am a human being; this of mine is a human experience. I am not an alien”.
The story like a mirror
If this resonance systematically is not or is lacking, the child will experience all his emotions directly (as is obvious), but he will tend not to recognize them or exclude them from his awareness, or try to “fight them”, as if they were incompatible psychic realities and therefore to be abandoned, to be contracted, to contrast, to be canceled, to be treated with hostility, or, in any case, to be done. In this way, progressively, it will be able to structure “blind areas of the self”, corresponding to systematically miserable experiences. The emotional resonance of caregivers (that is, of those who deal with the child) can take place directly, with the experience that the child is doing while he is doing it; Or indirectly, through the identification that child and adult can do in someone else’s experience. This is the most important thing that happens when we tell or read stories to children: we adults, together with them, resonate with the emotions of the characters of the story that we are unraveling.
If we limited ourselves to giving a name to the emotion that the child is experimenting, we would certainly do something good, but it would be very little. For a child, in fact, especially if small, feeling said, for example: “you are jealous” or “envious” or “sad” is really equivalent to hearing about cow, carriage, margherita, triangle, kilogram or thunderstorm. For him, jealousy, envy and sadness are names that indicate something, which does not necessarily correspond to some of his own experience. He takes everything for good, such as names and descriptions of the real world, regardless of what he lives. And he will then connect his experience in sometimes really bizarre ways.
When, on the other hand, we describe an experience through a story, the child, however small he is, he captures the emotional core of the experience itself: it recognizes it not only through a more or less acritical nomination process, but through a precise empathic emotional resonance, almost as if that experience is doing that experience. Through a thin game of fiction and truth, he knows that that experience is not doing that experience, but, at the same time, he learns precisely what experience it is, because it is almost as if he had lived it directly, through identification.
Fonagy, contemporary English psychoanalyst, calls reflective function The ability we have to grasp the mental states (and to understand the emotional experiences) of ours and the people with whom we come into contact. It is a natural capacity, of which we all have since birth, which however can be refined or inhibited by the experiences of resonance or “emotional deafness” in which we found ourselves participated.
Precious ability for the quality of life, ours and those who live with us, as it is the center of the ability to love and know people. Tales and fairy tales can thus be a source of great enrichment, not only of experiences, but also and above all of activation and training of these skills.
A tool that must be used with trial
Be careful, though. We adults can read or tell stories with three main different purposes. The one, good and enriching, is to bring children into contact with the truth of the fundamental experiences of life (birth, life, death, love, jealousy, envy, need for attachment, need to leave to explore the world, hope, frustration, rabies, rivalry, gratitude, tenderness, surprise, pleasure of discovery, new knowledge, diffidence, pain for the loss of things and people. Fear, helpless anguish, satisfaction, success, defeat, boredom …).
The second end is to make things do, for example: I’ll tell you a story to distract you, so you eat everything I want. Finally, the third is to confuse the child with falsehoods, for example: telling him the story of the stork that brings infants. Tell to express and enrich the emotional knowledge of oneself, of others and of life, on the one hand; Telling to confuse and to make something that otherwise would not do, on the other hand. In the intermediate position, the telling is placed to transmit values (honesty, sincerity, generosity, responsibility, courage, altruism, laboriousness, cunning, perseverance, solidarity, adventure …), and to sanction inconveniences (ingesting, envy, anger, unwaryness, deception, pride, cowardice, duplicity …). To you, now, remember at least one fairy tale for every emotion, value or inconvenience that I have mentioned as an example.
To give value to their experiences, the child needs to recognize his emotions. This can take place or perceive that an adult resonates with those emotions; Or imagining, with a participant adult, that someone else lives similar experiences and emotions. For this reason, stories stories and fairy tales are important in the psychic and relational development of the child. If you want to know more, we recommend reading Telling stories helps children by Margot Sunderland.
