Believe it or not, spinning yarns to your little ones can actually help boost their IQs! In one of the most interesting research studies of the past 15 years, child psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley investigated children’s language acquisition in 42 families with newborns. As reported in the article “What It Takes To Be A Student” in the New York Times Magazine on November 26, 2006, for the first three years of each child’s life, the researchers visited their families once a month, recording everything that occurred between parents and children.

They found that vocabulary growth varied tremendously by class — by age three, children whose parents were professionals had vocabularies of roughly 1,100 words, while children whose parents were on welfare had acquired an average of only 525 words. Furthermore, children’s scores on IQ tests correlated strongly with their vocabularies.

But what caused this large difference in vocabularies? It turns out that the professional parents spoke to their children far more frequently, were more encouraging, and addressed their children in richer, more complex sentences.

In the professional homes, each hour parents directed an average of 487 “utterances” — anything from a one-word command to a speech — to their children. In welfare homes, the children heard only 178 utterances per hour.

And almost as staggering, by age three, the average child in a professional home heard about 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements. But for welfare children, the situation was reversed: they heard, on average, roughly 75,000 encouragements and 200,000 discouragements.

Unsurprisingly, Hart and Risley concluded that language exposure in early childhood, especially affirmations and complex sentences, had positive effects on children’s IQs and future academic success. And although the two researchers didn’t study storytelling per se, storytelling is obviously a great way to expose children to complex language.

And don’t worry about turning every story into a vocabulary lesson. When you are speaking to a three-year-old, “complex” does not mean you have to throw in tons of dependent clauses or study your thesaurus for obscure Latin derivatives. By simply telling stories with abstract themes, real feelings, cause and effect, past and future — elements that you would naturally include in almost any tale — you will be stimulating your child’s intellectual development and language acquisition AND having fun!

If you would like some advice on how to tell age-appropriate tales to your young child, check out TallTales’ Storyelling Tips for Parents of Toddlers and Preschoolers.

Finding time to tell stories to our children is not always as easy as we would like. Between school, soccer, piano lessons, or whatever else your child is involved in—not to mention our own work and home responsibilities—it can seem like there is no time to spin yarns.

And when today’s kids (Generation Z?) are not engaged in organized activities, they are often sucked into electronic distractions: TV, DVDs, video games, favorite websites, iPods, and on and on. I’ve heard some exasperated adults refer to this as the “tyranny of choice.” Some parents say there are so many things competing for their child’s attention, that it is impossible to get them to sit down and read or listen to a story.

In my opinion, this is a cop-out. True, finding time for storytelling may be more difficult now than when our great grandparents were tots, but it is not nearly as hard as many people seem to think. After all, most young kids love to spend time with their parents. Here are three tips that have worked well for me:

1. Create a routine. If you are really committed to storytelling, the best way to ensure it gets the time it deserves is to make it part of your daily routine. When my youngest daughter was growing up, I would tell her a bedtime story every night as she was going to sleep. This quickly became part of our schedule and was a daily event that we both cherished and continued for years and years.

2. Get the most out of car time. When you are in the car with your kid, you have a potentially captive audience. Turn off the radio, the DVD player, and any other electronic gizmo and tell a story instead.

3. Plan your vacations to minimize electronic distractions. Where you go on vacation is up to you. Choose somewhere with no TV. Try camping, a dude ranch, a car trip, or someplace else that will allow your family to bond including plenty of time for storytelling.

And remember, when kids are young they crave attention. Once they realize that your stories put them at the center of the action, they’ll soon be begging for more. For additional tips on how to tell stories that your kids will clamor for, check out Family Storytelling Tips.

When it’s wet or snowy outside, it’s easy for cooped-up parents and kids to get on each other’s nerves. What parent hasn’t heard the cry of “We’re bored—there’s nothing to do!”

Luckily for you, I have a solution: storytelling theater. Next time kids (whether they’re all yours or some of them are just yours for the afternoon) threaten to drive you nuts, encourage them to put on an original play. Some kids will take to this idea right away and others may need a little convincing (bribing)—hot chocolate and cookies for all performers usually does the trick.

The goal is for the kids to create their own original story and then act it out in front of an audience. Even if this consists of you and the family dog, the kids won’t be fussy—especially if you up the dramatic ante by pulling out the video camera. (And if other kids are involved, their families will certainly love having a copy of the finished product—as will your own children.)

Start by encouraging the kids to come up with a story, including characters and plot. Younger kids will make the story up as they go along, but they should at least have a general idea of the story and who’s involved. If your kids need some storytelling tips, have them check out the TallTales’ Kids Only section.
One sure-fire way to get your kids enthused is to encourage them to make costumes and use props that relate to the story. Bring out old scarves, hats, shawls, and jewelry and dig up old Halloween wigs and costumes. Props can include anything from flashlights to brooms to stuffed animals—with a little thought, children will come up with all kinds of creative ideas. Your kids might also want to include music, singing, or sound effects in their play (either their own creations or a background CD). Once they get into it, the kids will amuse themselves for hours creating the perfect play. (And don’t be surprised if they want to perform their play again—or create spinoff stories involving the characters in their play.)

Creating an original play has three selling points: First and most importantly, it will keep your little gremlins entertained for a large chunk of the day. Second, it will save you from feeling guilty for plopping them in front of the TV, video game console, or computer. And finally, you’ll be able to sit back and enjoy a fun performance at the end of the day. (And if you make a video, this will be a family treasure for years to come.)

For kids who really get into theater, there are lots of good books available, such as Kids Take the Stage: Helping Young People Discover the Creative Outlet of Theater, by Lenka Peterson and Dan O’Connor (with a forward by actor Paul Newman), Back State Books, 2006.

Stories that feature your family pet (dog, cat, lizard, rabbit, bird, or fish) are bound to be popular with your child. Our own Clem the Detective Dog CD is based on a quirky family dog with a crooked tail and the intelligence and snoopiness of a private eye. But when your child’s beloved pet dies, storytelling may be the last thing on your mind. Think again. Telling stories about a departed animal friend can do much to help ease the pain of Fido’s or Taffy’s loss. The ASPCA’s special section for children, Animaland, has useful advice on helping young children deal with the death of a family pet. It suggests ways for kids to honor the memory of their pet, such as writing a story about your cat’s life. If you need help getting started, check out the kids’ book My Pet Died (Let’s Make a Book About It), by Rachel Biale (Tricycle Press, 1997). This book (written for preschoolers and young children) is a combination journal (for kids to record their memories) and scrapbook, with spaces for drawings or photos of the pet.

It’s obvious that storytelling can help children develop better reading and verbal skills, and, if they tell stories themselves, self confidence. But better math skills? Who knew?

Well for one, Daniela O’Neill and her colleagues at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. They found that preschoolers who can tell fairly sophisticated stories (from multiple perspectives) do better in math two years later than those who don’t have robust storytelling skills.

One of the tests that O’Neill’s team performed involved showing children a wordless picture book of a frog hopping around a restaurant and then asking them to tell the story to a puppet who had never seen the book. The kids who talked about the reactions of secondary characters, like the waiter, as well as the frog later outperformed kids who told the story as if the frog was the only character.

Interestingly, the researchers also tested the same preschoolers’ verbal abilities. Kid’s who had better vocabularies and spoke in longer sentences demonstrated no advantage in math later on.

O’Neill reasons that the type of skills it takes to switch perspectives in a story or to keep track of relationships are the same types of mental agility that are necessary for mathematics.

The moral of this little story? The more that your little ones are exposed to storytelling the better. So next time you spin a yarn to your preschooler, ask her a few open-ended questions about the plot or characters. Or better yet, have your kid tell you a story and encourage her to elaborate and incorporate multiple perspectives. The more practice the better!

For more information on O’Neill’s study, check out: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20071110/mathtrek.asp. And for some fun math stories for children grades three to six, check out Sideways Arithmetic from Wayside School, by Louis Sachar and other books in the popular Wayside School series.

There are tons of Thanksgiving books for kids, whether you want traditional stories about the pilgrims or something lighter that features your child’s favorite character. Dora, Spot, Corduroy, Franklin, Charlie Brown, Clifford, Maisy, Arthur, The Berenstain Bears, My Little Pony – even The Little Engine That Could – star in Thanksgiving stories. While reading an interesting and appropriate book is a great way to teach your kids the meaning of the holiday (it’s more than overeating and watching football), some of the best Thanksgiving stories will come from your childhood memories – whether it’s sitting at the kids’ table, helping make pumpkin pie, or breaking the wishbone. This will often lead to some fun new stories, such as what you would wish for if the wishbone was real? To jumpstart your imagination, check out http://www.luckybreakwishbone.com. This site sells fake wishbones – fun for playing the wishbone game if your Thanksgiving doesn’t include turkey (see Nava Atlas for some great vegetarian and vegan recipe ideas in the spirit of the holiday), or if you want everyone to get the wishbone this year. (You can even make earrings out of these wishbones! See http://www.tackyliving.com/article.php?id=149)

Getting a wee-bit tired of always being the storyteller? We all have those days when we’d just rather sit back and listen to a great tale than come up with one ourselves. Here’s an idea that may help. The next time you are feeling a little low on creative juices, switch roles and let your kid become the storyteller. Assuming you’ve already established a family storytelling tradition, chances are your child will love it and you will get to relax and be entertained!

I tried this with my grandson Christian the other day. At first he was a little bit shy about taking center stage but, with a little encouragement, he was soon making up tales faster than a famished cat can eat a can of tuna that tumbles to the kitchen floor.

No question, encouraging kids to tell stories takes a little patience. At first, most children tend to ramble and often have some difficulty developing their plot lines. By interjecting small questions like “What happened to the green monster?” or “Did the red monster really turn into a truck at the end?” you can help keep them on track, and eventually guide them towards some sort of satisfying ending.

Another common theme when kids are learning to tell tales is to closely parrot the plot line of a story they heard from you. Don’t be disappointed by this—not only is mimicry the ultimate form of flattery, it’s a comfortable way to start a storytelling career. Once your little copy-cat becomes more confident, she will have no problem coming up with her own, original tales.

Another benefit of your kids’ storytelling is that it will unquestionably help their oral skills. The more they practice at storytelling, the better and more efficient they will become at making points and summarizing events. And needless to say, it will also help stimulate their creativity, which is probably already robust.

For advice on how to get your kids started, check out TallTales’ Kids Only section where there are storytelling tips for kids as well as the beginnings of several new stories with familiar TallTales characters that your children can finish on their own.

Watching the baseball World Series recently, reminded me of my daughter’s childhood dream to become the first girl shortstop in the major leagues. Growing up, she played every ball-related sport she could get her hands or feet on, and she loved to watch Oakland A’s games on TV and at the ballpark. Unsurprisingly, sports stories would hook her every time, especially those that featured a girl baseball star.

If your kid is half as into sports as mine was (and as my grandkids are now), then stories that involve kids and sports will undoubtedly be popular. And your kids won’t care if the story is realistic—it can easily be about something as wild as the first girl shortstop in the Majors, who not only hits too, but on one occasion substitutes for the pitcher and pitches a perfect game. Similarly, if a boy remarkably like your son is somehow called up to be the star kicker for the Dallas Cowboys, or the kid who made the winning free-throw in the NBA finals, your boy will be happy to suspend his disbelief.

The key to a good sports story is to build the tension by throwing in some adversity. Perhaps after a horrendous string of injuries, the Boston Red Sox have to call up Melinda from the Minors, just before game seven of the World Series. But in the third inning with no score, Melinda nervously makes a silly error that costs her team a run. They are down 1-0 in the bottom of the ninth, with two outs when Melinda comes to bat…you get the picture.

Pressured by complaints from business travelers that families with small children were scooping up all the good seats before the first boarding group, Southwest Airlines recently changed their policy so families will now board between groups A and B. This markedly family-unfriendly switch is a surprising move by an airline that has always prided itself on catering to the “everyday” person. For this reason, the plan will undoubtedly backfire. Indeed, there are indications that Southwest is already back-pedaling in response to bad PR (such as generated by the group StopSouthwestPreboard.com.

But for me, this episode brings to mind the larger issue that none of the major airlines are particularly child-friendly. For example, while TV and music options are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, few airlines offer much in the way of children’s entertainment in their audio selections. (And the movie selections are typically geared to the adult traveler, often to the dismay of parents who don’t want their kids to watch grownup (often violent) fare.)

While you can always bring your own CD player or iPod with kids’ stories, it would be great to have more children’s audio available on flights. Adding a storytelling audio channel would be super-easy for airlines to do and would go a long way towards increasing children’s entertainment options. And as any parent who has traveled with young children knows, the more options the better. After all, kids can only watch so many cartoons on your DVD player and go through so many coloring books before they become bored, antsy, and noisy—or, in other words, a misery to themselves, as well as to everyone who sits nearby.

Because listening to audio stories allows a child to curl up with eyes closed, it’s a particularly great option for longer flights. With this in mind, I hereby offer TallTales’ stories free of charge, to the first airline that adds a children’s story audio selection. C’mon airline execs: Being a little nicer to your small passengers won’t make business travelers desert you. After all, most of them have kids, too.

Complicated Halloween costumes have never been my style—black jeans, a black t-shirt, and a devil’s ear headband are about par for my course. But luckily, creative get-ups are not the only way to shine on All Hallows Eve. After all, no Halloween party is complete without a good, old-fashioned, scary story.

The key to a successful scary story is to correctly size up your audience—obviously, what works great for an eleven-year old will be way too terrifying for a five-year old and there is nothing worse than genuinely terrifying a little tyke.

For little kids, the trick to a creepy-but-not-too-creepy tale is to give them a real scare at the very beginning of the story so there is plenty of time left for resolution. For example, the family who all lost their heads to a marauding ogre would turn out to be a Halloween spoof or the thumping noise in the attic can turn out to be a trapped kitten, not great grandfather’s angry ghost.

With older, braver children you can let the suspense build as the story unfolds and leave them with a scarier, unresolved ending (the headless horseman is still out there, etc.). But don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you need oodles of violence to make your story scary enough. Many of the most terrifying tales are blood-curdling without being particularly bloody—think Alfred Hitchcock, not Jason and Freddy.

Or if you really want to dial into the master scary tale teller, check out the Japanese ghost stories and fairy tales of Lafcadio Hearn (see. http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/books/japan/hearn.html, for some examples).

When in doubt, fall back on classic Halloween ploys like soul-stealing zombies, rampaging witches, and creatures that crawl out of the slime. Happy spooking!