Children often possess a vivacity that is bewildering to the adult. In the humdrum of the everyday, this vivacity can be mistaken for endless annoyance. The tired mother grumbles about the toilet paper roll pulled out to the very end by the baby teetering on wobbly legs. Yet, isn’t it all rather remarkable? Just how relentlessly driven children are to achieve the feat right before them?
As adults, we tend to take our eyes off our own page and feel foolish about working toward our next seemingly lowly accomplishment. We don’t notice the determination and fearsome stamina that goes into the quotidian feats of the early years. We forget: Everything a baby has done has been done countless times before, yet every single time it is a miracle.
Between babyhood and paying the annual tax bill, people lose their unfettered zest in stages. Many young children, especially those innocent and unused to the ways of the world, maintain a stunning ability to work toward the accomplishment of a goal. Their needs are not as simple as mouthing on the drawer pulls in the kitchen and methodically smearing mud across their faces. At this stage, their needs are more complex and intellectual. They are driven not only to manipulate the physical world but also to enter the arena of ideas. Maybe there are exceptions, but it seems practically universal: kids want stories.
Outside the confines of scheduled institutional activity, there’s a lot of malleable time that confronts kids. Relentlessly, children demand, “Can you tell us a story?” Persistent children whose parents have a modicum of literary or artistic skill give the world a tremendous gift.
Let’s consider the account of Adrianne Lobel, daughter of Arnold Lobel of the delightful “Grasshopper on the Road” book, the legendary “Frog and Toad” series, and others. Adrianne told the New Yorker about a scene that is easy to imagine, siblings bickering on a road trip. She said, “My father had been very quiet for a long time, and I guess he couldn’t stand listening to us anymore, and he said, ‘Do you want to hear a story?’ So we settled down, and he recited from beginning to end in verse a story he had just written in his head.”
That is the magic formula. Most adults don’t spontaneously craft stories. There are meals to fix and naps to take. It’s sometimes only when the clamor of bored children becomes so unbearable that the mental effort of inventing a narrative gains appeal. Children who have been around storytelling will often mimic it quite well, but given their limited vocabulary and life experiences, most children only get so far. Why is it that adults, who are so much more capable of telling stories worth the telling are reluctant to begin?
Something about trying to shoulder the weight of the world for which we were never meant to be fully responsible deadens the senses to fun. Afterall, that is what storytelling is: fun. Whether or not the tired mothers and fathers trying to get kiddos to bed or trying to teach them how to read enjoyed their storytelling experience, their tales are a gift to the world, to children and adults alike. There’s Kenneth Grahame’s “The Wind in the Willows,” a most excellent bedtime idyll. Likewise, Astrid Lindgren’s “Pippi Longstocking” began as a bedtime story for a little girl. One wonders if the “Noisy Village” tales inspired by Lindgren’s father’s childhood did not also arise from the second favorite command of so many children, “Tell me about when you were little.”
There’s also Carl Sandburg’s bewildering nonsense tales of mythical and magical proportions, “Rootabaga Stories,” which began as stories for his three daughters. Else Holmelund Minarik wrote the “Little Bear” books to give early readers, like her own students and daughter, interesting material that they could master.
While there may be examples of adults who wrote stories for no particular child, they are not our concern today. For the exasperated father staring down another bedtime gamut and the frazzled mother faced yet again with the demand for a story, the examples of mothers and fathers who told stories that made the world a better place are a source of great solace. It’s worth remembering that the sitting around and storytelling is not a distraction from the main events of childhood but really and truly the whole point itself. The house has to be reasonably orderly; the meals have to be cooked and served, but the endless accolades now available for the earning in young childhood are not necessary. They may even hinder the very serious fun of storytelling, a skill that makes life worth living.
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