Storytelling

By Jing Villamil

DO you still read, or share from your own stocked knowledge, a bedtime story to your child to prepare him or her to sleep? Sadly, in a research made by technology developer TomTom last February, covering 1000 parents with children ages 3 to 10 as subjects, only a third of the number still told stories at bedtime. Most common reasons why not were “fatigue at the end of the day” and “daily commute”.

This is a pity, as the bedtime story is a traditional institution in many families all over the world that yields many significant benefits for parents and children alike. Bedtime storytelling as a fixed routine improves the children’s brain development, mastery of language especially verbal, and the skill of thinking along logical lines. It also increases the emotional bond between parent and child. And because children have this strong imitative instinct, the stories and characters act as guides for them to distinguish between “good” and “evil”. And with a parent’s insightful selection, these stories can teach the abstract virtues of sympathy, kindness, unselfishness, self-control, etc. As the children grow older and the theme of these stories are broadened, so are the children’s conception of the lives and feelings of others.

These stories can also be used to introduce and discuss darker subjects as death, illness, peer rejection, bullying, depression, social class distinction and separatism, etc. Words of caution to the parents: stories the children remember with much fondness may turn out to be too cruel and gruesome. So tread cautiously when choosing stories touching on these “dark” themes.

For Little Red Ridinghood and her grandma must probably have been eaten by the fox, if not for the timely modern revision of the script. Dear Rapunzel, Rapunzel was snatched from her Queen Mother by a witch, whom the matured Rapunzel, Rapunzel dropped down her high tower by pretending she was still attached to her longest many-storeyed hair, when in fact, she was no longer.

Cinderella was made a virtual maid in her own home, polishing floors and boots, washing dishes and clothes, for a family she was not even connected to by blood. And until a fairy godmother and her army of animals and plants interceded, Cinderella would still be sniffing cinders with not a glass shoe in sight

And how about Snow White who was so beautifully dumb as to bite unto an apple from a complete stranger so suspiciously unnaturally bent and ugly and truly witchy when she knew she had an evil stepmother who turned into a witch from one scam to another. And she fell for the first witch who just happened to drop by the dwarves’ hut in the forest so far from civilization where she hid on witness protection? Haaaay.

No wonder I would rather sing to the children a lullaby to “lull” them, and me, to sleep: rock-a-bye baby on the treetop . . .

Wait a minute. Why rock-a-bye, why place the baby on a cradle on the treetop?

Had we been singing okay to infanticide since the wind blew, the bough broke a long, long time ago?!

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