Sharing – How Stories Help Children Build Emotional Intelligence
The article below describes all the mental health benefits of telling stories to children:
Discover how storytelling helps children build emotional intelligence by teaching empathy, self-awareness, and problem-solving through engaging stories.
I want you to consider something else. There aren’t enough people telling children their real stories and teaching them how to tell their own. Another part of emotional intelligence is the ability to communicate what is happening to you. I simply don’t see many examples of that. Perhaps that is my experience, but more and more I see people who don’t have these skills, while I see fewer people articulating their stories very well to friends, family, and the general public.
I don’t think that is a coincidence.
It’s not just a lack of children’s stories that could help them develop these skills; it’s a lack of adults who can provide the example of those skills in action. It’s almost as if we don’t see the issues with emotional intelligence and mental health among young people as something older generations contributed to, by not being able to pass on our own stories as examples, because we didn’t have the skills either. We just grew up in a time when talking about it was considered taboo, and look how well that has turned out for us.
