A story well told: The lost art of personal narrative

Every child needs storytelling in his life. The personal narrative is the best of storytelling, a form of literature that seems to have gone the way of the traditional telephone. The ritual of the oral tradition, family stories, which can carry over to the personal narrative and storytelling has been lost to many young people.

In my time, storytelling was often connected to school and family. At the end of the school day, our teacher would dim the classroom lights and read from a book. Heads would go down and we would rest on our arms. We would close our eyes and listen to her soft voice rise and fall, describing the dialogue or the features of the story characters taken from Brothers Grimm and Hans Brinker. I can still recite several of those stories verbatim.

The same might be said of Sunday meals when our family would come together: grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins would all talk about the past and become storytellers recreating their own childhoods or personal narrative, however imperfect they were.

Today’s children are losing this valuable experience to electronics and media.
Recently, I watched an animated film that was shown to young students at a school’s family movie night. It was a wonderful evening as the children appeared in their pajamas, holding their favorite pillows or stuffed animals as families huddled together on blankets. The potential for the development of a personal narrative that children would someday tell to their own children about the family movies they attended with their parents at the school was in full array. What was missing, however, with the animated movie was that there was little or no storyline or lasting dialogue for the children to hold on to. The potential dialogue had been taken over by the over-stimulating graphics and sound that overwhelmed any storytelling and a potential personal narrative.
Again, the power of electronics was taking over the children’s brains.

Mr. Rogers was the ultimate storyteller and gave children the opportunity for the personal narrative as he slowly and softly described his daily personal narrative to his young audience. The end result of the long narrative was not only expanding the child’s working memory (focusing and processing skills) but was also stimulating the limbic system and the hippocampus which is the part of the brain that forms positive relationships with the learning process.

The beauty of the personal narrative or story is that it can promote emotional and psychological stability and keep our brains regulated. The personal narrative can ground our experience in a linear way and even promote greater problem solving that can serve as blueprints for a positive emotional identity with our experience and environment.