Homemade Stories

By Theresa Rose
Issue 107, July/August 2001

Everyone agrees that reading to children is very beneficial. Rarely will you meet parents who do not read to their offspring; composing stories for our children, on the other hand, is usually left to the experts. Few of us are so brash as to attempt to actually write a story. But children don't expect us to be Shel Silverstein or Dr. Seuss. Although my children like to hear "professionally written" stories, when given the choice, they will opt to hear one of my "homemade" tales.

For instance, take my story about a dishrag. My son Matthew and I were in the kitchen when he asked for a story, and the dishrag was the first object that caught my eye. One day, I told him, this dishrag became bored with his mundane life in the kitchen and ventured outside into the wintry Great Unknown. To his dismay, he found that a wet and soppy dishrag would freeze in such frigid temperatures and was thankful for his warm dry home when he got back.

For days after I came up with that fable, my son pleaded, "Tell me the story again about the dishrag." That story quickly became a serial, with the dishrag having different adventures every day. Even I was amazed by the stories I created. All I did was follow a simple formula I read about in a book called Tell Me a Story, by Chase Collins: find a hero/heroine, make up a situation/conflict, and find a resolution/ending (optional).

Conversely, don't be insulted if your child falls asleep in the midst of one of your most creative moments. Matthew made his way onto the astral plane one night just as Bobby's spaceship was on its way to the moon in what I thought was a very exciting story.

Fortunately, you can always rerun your story the next night; chances are, your child will probably ask you to do so. Don't be surprised to find yourself rerunning some stories long after you thought they'd be forgotten. What may have been a dull story to you could end up being a favorite of your child's.

I made up one such story about a mouse who lived in Times Square and partied with his friends one New Year's Eve while they waited for the ball to drop at midnight. My daughter Maia, four years old at the time, especially marveled at all the food the human merrymakers dropped on the streets that fed the mice. She helped me compose the story by coming up with more and more crazy and exotic foods the mice found.

Ali, who was two at the time, loved the story about the little girl who lived in a teeny, weeny house and played with itty, bitty toys. Each of the children, in turn, came up with other objects the girl had and more ways to describe them: "little," "small," "tiny," "minuscule," and so on. These kinds of stories stretch the imagination and strengthen the vocabulary as well. More often than not, my children will come up with a plot twist that I would never have conceived.

One night Maia asked me to tell a story about a mouse. A few sentences into the story, she informed me that the name of the mouse should be Mickey. Of course I went into a description of Disneyland, and when I was describing the "It's a Small World" ride, I broke out into song and sang all the verses I could remember. Singing was healing for me and left me with a feeling of well-being before I went to sleep. My children were slumbering at the end of the song, and I felt good knowing they ended their day in a tranquil way (in sharp contrast to how the rest of the day went!). Simple, even monotonous tales have a place in our lives, too. Plots can be rudimentary or nonexistent, and even parents who think they have little imagination should try making up stories for their children.

Bedtime Stories
Bedtime stories are a good place to start. Just the sound of mother's or father's voice is music to your children's ears. I've lulled my children to sleep many times with "dull" stories. The most successful one to date is the one about the Sandman who traveled the world over helping people get to sleep. There was not much of a plot to that one-it was just a long list of places that he visited, like Singapore, Australia, Columbia, Madrid, Istanbul, Belgium, Siberia, and Timbuktu, and a little bit of information about each place (if I knew any). By the time he had gone around the globe, the children, too, were "gone."