Why is it important to tell your stories to your children?

One important reason is that it serves to connect your children to previous generations and to help them to feel a part of the larger whole of your family. Perhaps a more important reason is that telling your children your stories helps them to deal with the difficult challenges that they'll be facing in their life.

The truth is that your kids will go through some real struggles. As parents, it can be painful to watch--and it is seldom useful to try to come to the rescue. What can be helpful to your kids is to know that their father, and other significant people in their lives, have gone through similar struggles and have survived.

Stories are often about struggles and failures. Your children love to hear stories about these struggles because they have them often in their own lives. They know failure and struggle extremely well; that's a lot of what being a kid is about.

The stories you tell them will ultimately be comforting. That you have had these struggles and have come back and recovered is encouragement to them; your kids will need a truckload of encouragement to navigate their way through life. It's a gift to be able to communicate what's in your heart through the use of stories. Stories can not only be used as a vehicle to pass along your values, but they are likely to inspire your children to repeat the same process with their children.

Here are five suggestions to help you in story-telling with your children:
1. Tell stories to your kids when they're the most attentive to them--when they're in bed, or settled down so they can sit still for awhile.
2. Make sure to include stories of you failing miserably. These are particularly useful to your kids. We've all got a few of these, don't we?
3. Have your parents tell your children some of their own stories if they're able--a great way to show the connection that exists between generations.
4. Use stories to answer your kids' questions about difficult issues. They need to know that you've faced these issues yourself, and that there are many choices available.
5. Realize that you don't need a history of storytelling in your family to get started, and you don't need to be a great storyteller. Give some thought to experiences you've had that might relate to some of the issues your kids are facing right now or in the near future.

There is a short window of opportunity in which to tell your children the stories of your life. Many fathers fail to tell their stories because of a lack of a story-telling tradition in their family of origin. This can be a wonderful opportunity to begin your own tradition with your own stories.

May your stories live on eternally.

Copyright © 2004 Mark Brandenburg. All rights reserved worldwide.