Storytelling for parents and grandparents

I couldn’t resist putting up this picture of my mother, my grandmother and my aunt, taken around 1926.

Telling stories in your family can be deeply satisfying, something the children remember for their entire lives. Find a quiet time, get cozy and settle in for stories. Remember, it’s about strengthening our connections, our relationships. Here are some good times to tell stories:

• Bedtime, of course,

• On long car rides,

• While waiting in a doctor’s office,

• Around the campfire,

• And, especially for distant grandparents, on Zoom.

  
  Consider telling personal stories, folktales, made up stories, true tales from history and stories from books. Don’t forget about nursery rhymes, campfire stories, camp songs, riddles, knee-dandles and fingerplays. What were your favorite childhood stories? Try these out. If you don’t remember them, check out collections of folktales in the public library, in 398.2 in the Dewey decimal system.

If you make up stories to tell every night at bedtime, you might choose a main character who will be part of all the stories. Or use your own child as the main character. Remember that every story needs conflict, even if it’s only a mild one. Watch the children as you tell, to gauge what works and what doesn’t. It’s fun to pass a story back and forth, too. It’s never too early or too late to learn to tell stories.

Some children love hearing about when their parents or grandparents were little. It seems so unlikely to them! They especially like the stories of childhood naughtiness. You can also pass along valuable family history and culture this way. Family photos are good springboards for these stories.

Here are a few guidelines for telling stories to children, considering stages of child development:

Age 0-2: Children enjoy peekaboo, patty cake, nursery rhymes, fingerplays. Use rhyme and rhythm.
Age 2-3: Still use fingerplays, rhyme and rhythm, lots of repetition. Simple, simple stories, 5 minutes or less. When they’re done listening, they’re done.
Age 4-5: Starting to differentiate from others, to understand others’ feelings. Continue repetition, rhyme, rhythm. Go a little longer. Silliness works well. Tales about families.
Age 6-7: More aware of others, of emotions, getting an idea of morality. Better at predicting where the story goes.
Age 8-10: Able to figure out tricky stories, curious about other countries and the natural world. Now understand irony and sarcasm. May be less engaged by repetition.
Age 11-13: Go for the gore to begin with. Tell stories you would tell to adults (though not sexually explicit stories) to these kids. They can take it.

Here are a few good books to get you started:
Telling your own stories by Donald Davis. In this great little book, Davis’ story prompts draw out your personal stories.

The Parents’ Guide to Storytelling by Margaret Read MacDonald. Also look for other collections by this author-librarian-storyteller, such as Twenty Tellable Tales and The Storyteller's Start-up Book.

Awakening the Hidden Storyteller: How to Build a Storytelling Tradition in Your Family by Robin Moore.

The Grammar of Fantasy: an Introduction to the Art of Inventing Stories by Gianni Rodari, translated by Jack Zipes. This is a quirky, funny book, full of ideas on how to play with stories in unusual ways.

If you want to augment your own storytelling, I have a subscription service to bedtime stories on Patreon—feel free to check out the two free stories to hear how I tell a short story with a little winding-down chat. Grandparents can subscribe and then give the password to their children or grandchildren.

Questions or suggestions? Leave them in the comments!

Stories of my mother

I know it's a cliche but it's true: people live on through the stories we tell about them. I'm writing this two days before my mother's funeral.

My mother, Carol Edgelow Howe, grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts. She and her three sisters often visited their grandparents in Westmount, Quebec. One Christmas, when she was about three, she was put to bed while her parents and grandparents ate supper. Little Carol was certain that Santa Claus was down the street by the corner.  She got out of bed and left the house alone on that snowy night. The family dog, a Newfoundland named Caesar, followed, then got in front of her. He pushed her back up the steps of the house. She was furious with him! How dare he keep her from Santa Claus!

Maybe that visit? Mom was headstrong, even at that age.

Mom had a powerful imagination, a lively mind and a wicked sense of humor. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1945, though the story is that the Dean had to call her father to discuss my mother's errant ways--reading novels rather than her assignments and dating boys. She was a looker!

I suspect she was a big daydreamer. In her later years, after my father died, we discovered that it was also Mom who was the dawdler. When I was in school, she was insistent that we not be late. I found some of her grammar school report cards and discovered that in fourth grade, she was late dozens of times!

After working at a florist shop and a nursery, as well as a lifetime of gardening and raising houseplants (her Cattleya orchids were always in bloom), Mom wrote garden columns for newspapers for forty years. Her last column was in September 2016 at age 93. Whenever I asked her for gardening advice, she always gave the same answer: "Why don't you call your Extension Agent?"

Mom was deeply invested in her church, St. Columba's in Boothbay Harbor, Maine and involved in the church's mission in Belém, Brazil. Not surprising, as my father was an Episcopal priest.

My parents, early in their marriage.

Mom was concerned with issues of hunger and poverty. When she went to church, she always brought at least one can of food for the pantry. In her gardening articles, she suggested people "plant a row for the hungry," an initiative of the Garden Writers of America. Mom loved to spend time outdoors, to sing, to read--she belonged to two book clubs in Maine, where she spent the last thirty years of her life, until last October when we moved her to Kansas to be near three of her seven children.

Mom in 2016

All seven of her children in one place for the first time in ten years, 2017

We moved Mom to Lawrence, Kansas because none of us was close enough to Maine to help in an emergency. This proved to be prescient. In late February, she had a stroke. She'd been in assisted living, but moved into long-term care with hospice. All of her children were able to come to Kansas to say goodbye. We had the luxury of nine weeks with her after her stroke. My in-town siblings, Mary and Thomas, their spouses, and I spent time with her every day. She loved visits from my siblings' dogs, too.

The stroke took a bit of her short-term memory and her ability to process writing, but Mom did not have dementia. She was aware and coherent for the few hours each day she was awake. She loved hearing e-mails and cards from family and friends. We read to her, brought her flowers from our gardens, fed her and advocated for her. We even had cocktail hour with her a few times. After the first one she told the nurse that she'd had almost a whole beer. Well, actually, she had three small sips and a couple of goldfish crackers.

In March, I wrote a blog post about storytelling as a respite. Now you know why. 

Mom died with a slight smile on her lips on Sunday, April 30, 2017 at 11:50 a.m. My sister Mary and I were at her side. 

RIP Carol Edgelow Howe, 1923-2017. 

If you feel so inclined, plant a row for the hungry or take some nonperishables to your local food pantry in her honor.