SECTION ONE

MY STORY JOURNEY

1

From Dried Prunes to Juicy Plums:
Why Use Stories?

Imagination and storytelling

A mother once brought her nine-year-old, potential ‘prodigy’ son to Albert Einstein and asked how her boy could further improve on his mathematics. Einstein replied ‘Try telling him some stories.’ The mother persisted in asking him about the maths issue. Einstein said ‘Tell him stories if you want him to be intelligent, and even more stories if you want him to become wise.’

I first read about Einstein’s views on stories and the imagination when I was a student teacher in the 1970s. As my favourite subject was maths, I felt drawn to his writings and was intrigued to read why a mathematical genius like Einstein placed imaginative thinking on a more important level than ‘knowledge’. He argued that knowledge is limited to all we know and understand in the present, while imagination can embrace all there ever will be to know and understand. According to Einstein, imagination stimulates progress. Great inventions, he said, require an imaginative mind.

This was a new concept for me, and created my first link between stories, imaginative thinking and education. After passing my teaching degree at twenty-four I entered the workforce. Within six months I had my first experience of the power of ‘story’ on children’s imaginations.

I was working as an assistant in a kindergarten in Sydney, Australia. In the weeks leading up to Christmas, the teacher decided to use a story from the Nutcracker Suite with its Christmas theme. She planned a visit to the class by the ‘Sugar Plum Fairy’. Needing someone to dress up as the fairy, the teacher convinced me to trust her decision and take on this role. I remember first laughing at this idea, thinking that the children would be sure to recognise me, and that this would spoil the magical mood.

On the day of the festival I disappeared from class during playtime, went into the storeroom and changed into ‘fairy’ costume. I wore my mother’s white satin wedding slip, carried a gold star wand in one hand, and a basket full of ‘sugar plums’ (nuts and raisins wrapped in red cellophane) in the other.

Meanwhile the teacher had gathered the 25 children around her, and at the appointed moment I nervously danced into the middle of the circle. The children sat in awe! As the teacher played some music from the story, I gave out a ‘sugar plum’ to each child. While I was doing this, one of the older boys, who had just turned six, reached out and touched my dress, saying with wide-open eyes, ‘I’ve never touched a real fairy before!’

After changing back into my normal clothes, I emerged into the garden where the children were playing. Some of them were still carefully holding their ‘sugar plums’, not wanting to open them until their parents arrived. Others were eating them slowly and joyfully. When the children saw me, they cried out, ‘Susan, where have you been, you missed the Sugar Plum Fairy!’

This left me with many questions. As the years passed and I became a mother of young children myself, my observations of the effect of stories on children’s imaginations led me to further research.

To understand the breadth and depth of a child’s imagination, I looked first at the difference between child and adult consciousness. I had studied child development during my training, and I understood that a child is not just a miniature adult. From direct observations of my own three boys and the young children in my classes there was a world of difference between us. The physical, emotional, social and cognitive differences seemed logically explained through maturation and development.

But what about the imagination? Unlike most other human qualities this power started out as vast and wondrous, then gradually shrank! I remember in my early childhood that imagination could transport me into the clouds (sometimes they became horses, or dolphins, or dragons); or take me over the hills and beyond our town (I would imagine following the train tracks that passed by our house, and being carried out into the big wide world on all sorts of adventures). This power could even admit me to the quivering, pulsating life of plants, flowers and insects in my garden. Back then I remember feeling that anything was possible and attainable – I was the world and the world was me! Years of so-called ‘growth and development’ later, I ended up as a young adult with limited imagination, needing to work on recovering my imaginative thinking. Many of my adult friends have had similar experiences. How could this be explained?

My quest for an answer has taken many years. I did not find it in texts on educational psychology or child development, but in the imaginative works of poets. The first insights that struck a deep chord in me came from Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’. Here he beautifully captures the journey of a child from ethereal worlds of spirit into birth, then through childhood, adolescence and on into adulthood.

From ‘Intimations of Immortality’ by William Wordsworth:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting –
The soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar –
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home –
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy.
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended.
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

This poem helped me form a more holistic picture of child consciousness. Rather than just ‘advancing’ from childhood to adulthood, there is also a loss. I have often felt that ‘heaven lies about us in our infancy’ when looking at a sleeping child – an experience of angelic presence, a sense of the divine. But these ‘clouds of glory’ fade, and, as Wordsworth laments: ‘Shades of the prison-house begin to close, upon the growing boy’ – until finally the ‘vision splendid…fades into the light of common day’.

Could there, I wondered, be a way to keep this openness or vibrant connection from fading or shrinking?

I puzzled over this a long time. Then, just recently, I had a joyous discovery that gave me much encouragement as a storyteller. In his book Matter, Imagination and Spirit,i Owen Barfield, like Wordsworth, depicts two realities – the spiritual and the physical, the ‘hidden’ and the ‘everyday’. But rather than abandoning us adults to this bare dichotomy he suggests a bridge between the two, a way of travelling from one to the other. This bridge or connection between matter and the spirit is the ‘imagination’ – beautifully depicted by Barfield as a rainbow bridge of imaginative activity. No doubt there are other ways to build this bridge – with prayer, meditation, music – but the idea of the ‘imaginative’ bridge rang wonderful bells for me.

These poetic illuminations helped me to understand why stories and fairytales speak so clearly to children, who are still in a much more dream-like stage, open to both physical and subtler, spiritual realities. Could truths contained in the rich realm of story reach children more directly, and in a way more in tune with their innate imaginative capacities? As adults, unless we have had an imaginative, story-rich education or have natural imaginative or creative gifts, it seems we have to work very hard to re-build our imaginative faculties.

When someone asked one of my sons at the age of six why he liked fairytales, he replied: ‘Because they think about what I think about’. This childlike wisdom helped build another link in my chain of understanding – for a child the imaginative and spirit world could be as real as the physical, everyday world. Children seem to have the ability to cross back and forth on this bridge like butterflies. Most adults, on the other hand, struggle to take the smallest steps, like cumbersome many-legged caterpillars, from one realm to the other.

An elderly mentor once told me that the journey of a storyteller is a ‘spiritual quest’. When I first heard this I wondered what the connection was between storytelling and spirituality. Now I understand why she believes this. Nourishing the imagination, stories can help us as adults to shed our caterpillar skins, metamorphose into butterflies and explore the gardens of ‘hidden’ reality.

Food for imaginative thought

A young doctor once attended a storytelling course I was running. In the introductory session, when it was his turn to say why he had enrolled, he told the group that he had been studying medicine at university for six years. As a result his mind, in his own words, felt like a ‘dried-up prune’. He was hoping that storytelling would help make it a ‘juicy plum’ again, as he remembered it had been in childhood. Over the next few weeks, starting with a simple story of the life of a carrot (with carrot seeds and a real carrot as story props) he progressed to telling and writing imaginative tales. This same doctor now has a reputation for being wonderful with children. He keeps a story-bag in his surgery and to help relax his little patients he pulls out a story prop (a paper frog, a little doll, a shiny pebble…) and tells a story about it, gently easing the child into their check-up or injection.

In our busy adult lives it is easy for our imagination to ‘dry up’. Like a muscle, it can atrophy from lack of use and may need exercises to build it up again. My secondary education focused on the sciences and rational thinking, and my shrinking imagination was rarely sparked by my teachers. As an adult I now feed my imagination through reading and writing poetry and stories. The students who enrol in my Storytelling unit at Southern Cross University, Australia, are advised to read a children’s story every day of the term. If your imagination also feels like a ‘dried-up prune’, I suggest you start by choosing ten stories in this book and reading one each day. Although they are written primarily for children, you may find the metaphors and imaginative journeys feed your adult soul. If this is of benefit, I suggest you continue reading more stories, whether for children or adults. Fantasy novels like the ‘Lord of the Rings’ are another rich source of food for the imagination. It may also help to participate in a storytelling or writing course, and attend storytelling sessions.

The natural world can also be a wonderful source of inspiration. When I am pondering ideas for a story, I find that some of my best ideas come from nature. Walking through the bush or along the beach, sitting in the park or in the garden: these experiences have fed my imagination whenever I have ‘writer’s block’. Even housebound, I found that looking out through my window at the branch of a tree, with its patterned bark, budding leaves and silver raindrops, helped inspire a story idea.

Nature has the potential to relax and cleanse us, to strengthen and nurture us – in fact to reconnect us with ourselves. Especially when writing stories for young children, I find I need to bathe in nature’s wonder and beauty on a regular basis to keep myself open to the wonder and beauty of life.

Scepticism and self-doubt

A common barrier to imaginative thinking in adults can be scepticism about the importance and relevance of stories to modern life. When I approached the Dean of Research at the local university about a scholarship for a research project on storytelling, his first response was to laugh at me; but then he challenged me to prove this was a real subject for research. It was a satisfying moment several years later to have him shake my hand at my Masters Graduation! His scepticism had slowly changed to genuine interest and the university soon added Storytelling to their list of subjects.

In my courses I meet scepticism on a regular basis. Once a psychologist/parent, who was attending the course asked to share an experience with the group. She told us how ridiculous she had thought all this ‘story and imaginative stuff’ was, and being a science student she had decided to put it to ‘empirical’ test. The previous week she had been in the park with her children. Near the swings she had overheard a grandmother having a fierce debate with her young granddaughter. The grandmother wanted the child to put the safety belt across the swing and the child kept refusing. So grandma wouldn’t push the child and the child sat on the swing crying. Grandma was telling her that if she didn’t put the belt on she might fall out, break an arm and end up in hospital, and her mother would be very cross.

The sceptical mother recalled an unusual creative flash while searching her mind for an imaginative rather than head-on approach. She asked the grandmother if she could help. Receiving permission, she looked at the little girl and said, ‘Did you know that this swing has a magic sash, and if you tie it up it turns you into a princess and takes you swinging up high. Shall I tie it up for you’. The little girl stopped crying, looked up at her wide-eyed and nodded YES. So the surprised and no longer sceptical mother tied up the safety belt, grandmother started to push the child on the swing and the confrontation melted away.

Often people’s scepticism is coupled with self-doubt about their own creative abilities. A father had been struggling to teach his four-year-old son to pee straight into the toilet and not all over the top and sides. After a session on the creative power of metaphor, he tried working with the simple visual word ‘waterfall’ (instead of the abstract word ‘straight’). The father reported that the boy immediately took up the challenge to make an uninterrupted waterfall into the loo – every time he needed to go! The father was amazed at the result of a one-word change, and very chuffed at what he called his ‘first creative achievement’. From this simple playing with metaphor, the father went on to make up stories at bedtime for both his son and daughter. He later commented on the positive bonding that resulted from this, coupled with his enhanced creativity.

Most teachers and therapists who attend my story-making workshops respond with a resounding NO when asked if they think they could write a story before the day is over. Three to four hours later, their imaginations ‘juiced’ with many story examples, and with a framework to guide their ideas, they are usually surprised by the positive results.

Even African teachers, born and raised in a storytelling culture, frequently reveal this self-doubt. My focus for my Masters Research was informed by this – how could I, as a storyteller from a nonstorytelling background, find ways to help African teachers ‘wakeup’ their cultural storytelling skills? One way was to encourage discussion and trigger memories through the power of story itself. In the training modules in Cape Town, after struggling to get a group discussion going, I decided to tell a simple story about a tree that was once tall and healthy with strong roots, and then through lack of care grew stunted and weak, and lost its leaves. These images helped the participants to recall childhood memories from their own ‘story tree’. It encouraged an older woman to sit on the floor and demonstrate how her grandmother used to play the ‘uhardi’ at story time (a stringed musical instrument made from a dried gourd). From this beginning the memories and the stories really started to flow, and it was easy to build up a picture of the present ‘story tree’ and possibilities for its future. The story and the simple imagery of the tree inspired the women to talk. The session was much more fruitful than the previous one, when I had asked for memories of childhood and no one in the group wanted or was brave enough to speak. This discussion (which ended up filling two sessions) helped reconcile the group with the storytelling culture of their past; some storytelling skills, especially in the older women, were renewed; and a future enthusiasm for storytelling, both cultural and multi-cultural, was generated.

Another instance occurred when I asked a more experienced group in Cape Town to write and present a story of their own. Only three of the ten women came with their homework. The ones without stories walked in with heads down and very upset. ‘It’s too hard, Susan, we can’t do it’ they complained. I placed a chair at the front of the room, sat on it, and shared one of my own stories as a warm-up. Then the three women with homework shared their stories, with much prompting from me. By the time they had finished, the atmosphere in the room had completely changed. The three storytellers were feeling very proud of themselves. Then two more women jumped into the story chair and told stories that they made up on the spot. The women were convinced that the story chair had a special power, and together we adorned it with coloured ribbons. The following week the other five women arrived, insisted on sitting in the marked chair, and all proceeded to tell wonderful traditional stories.

‘Born to be King’

A personal example of pushing through self-doubt is an experience that challenged my abilities as a therapeutic storywriter. On my first visit to East Africa I worked for an outreach teacher training centre. While running their storytelling module in Nairobi, I was asked by a young Kenyan mother for help with her son who had been sexually abused by his ayah (nanny) at the age of three. The boy had contracted a sexually transmitted disease as a result of this abuse. For several months, while the medication took time to work, it was extremely painful for him to pass urine. When I met the mother, the child was six years old, the disease was cured at a physical level, but at an emotional level the fear of the pain remained. He needed continual support to be able to go to the toilet – his mother needed to sit with him, sing to him and read to him until he could relax enough to let go…

Now that her son was ready to begin full-time schooling, the mother was desperate for something to help him overcome his fears. Could a story help, she wondered?

This question put me into humble shock, as I had been teaching about the ‘healing’ power of story and yet had never had to work with this kind of challenging situation. Of course, I wanted to help if I could, but I wondered if I had the skills and understanding for such a task. After all, I was not a trained psychologist. But I decided to give it a try. For the next few nights I didn’t get much sleep – would-be storywriters be prepared for the midnight birthing of stories!

My first request was to meet the child. The mother arrived with a tall, proud and handsome brown-skinned boy by her side. When I saw him I thought that he looked like a young prince. Trusting my intuition, I said to the mother (out of the boy’s hearing) that I felt the story should be about a prince who was ‘Born to be King’. I was concerned, though, that kings and princes were not such a strong part of African culture. Her reply was that her son’s favourite stories were about kings, queens and castles.

I now had my starting point. The next night I stayed up scribbling on a notepad in the dim light of many candles. Working with my framework of metaphor, journey and resolution I wrote ‘Born to be King’ (see page 230) and gave the mother a copy before boarding the plane back to Australia. The resolution was clear for me – the boy needed to find inner strength and confidence. Briefly, the journey would flow from the sunlight into the dark castle and back out into the sunlight. The obstacle and helping metaphors were many (see chapter on ‘Writing Therapeutic Stories’). Two months later the mother’s email to me confirmed the therapeutic success of this story. It was also wonderful encouragement for me to continue pursuing a path of therapeutic story work.

Listing reservations

At this early stage in the book, it is quite natural to expect you to have questions of your own about the value of stories and storytelling for children. Before reading any further it may help you to review the list below of five common reservations often expressed by workshop participants. Tick what applies to you, then add any more of your own.

	I am not a creative person
	I could never think up metaphors and imaginative ideas with children
	I could never write a story
	The challenging behaviours I am facing with my child/ children could never be addressed by an imaginative approach
	I am not convinced that stories have ‘healing’ potential
	…………………………………………………………………………
	…………………………………………………………………………
	…………………………………………………………………………

I suggest you check back with this list after finishing the book.

The next two chapters continue my personal story journey by documenting the effect of stories on my family and professional life. By including personal anecdotes and experiences I want to encourage you with examples of the tangible healing power of stories. Although I have divided these into stories for parenting situations, and those from the field of teaching and counselling, I encourage you to read both chapters, no matter what your occupation, as all areas of story experience with children can provide useful ideas.

iSee reference section

2

Weaving Stories into the Family Fabric

The light of stories has woven many shining threads through the fabric of my family. In this chapter I share examples that have coloured and strengthened family life from the time when my three boys were very young through to their primary school years and beyond. To help with writing these experiences, I ‘interviewed’ my sons, Kieren, Simon and Jamie, at their respective adult ages of 29, 28 and 26. Their memories merged with mine, and are published with their permission. It is my hope that this sharing of experiences will help inspire you to interweave stories into your own family life.

Influenced by my storytelling experiences as a teacher (see next chapter), I entered parenting with a strong sense of the importance of stories for healthy child development. I continually gathered storybooks for my children from second hand bookshops, fairs and libraries. The collected stories expanded and grew as the boys developed – from nursery and nature tales, to folk and fairy tales from many cultures, myths and legends, and then, in their teens, biographical stories on explorers and adventurers (for more on story ‘genres’ see Chapter Six).

During the boys’ younger years, our story bedtime ritual was one of my favourite parenting activities. Although most days I would find myself quite tired by the evening (especially during my single-parenting period), reading or telling stories was a soothing and reenergising experience. And if I was totally exhausted I could rely on some rhythmical and humorous ballads to bring me back to life…

The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea, in a beautiful pea-green boat …

Christopher Robin had wheezles and sneezles …

This last poem in the AA Milne seriesⁱ was a wonderful resource if any of the boys were unwell. I would sit on the end of their beds and read this aloud – the humour helped to lighten the situation a little. Another favourite from this series was ‘The King’s Breakfast’ – a long story in rhyme about a king who wanted a ‘little bit of butter’ for his bread. It was an excellent one to recite as a way of changing the subject if the boys were arguing at the breakfast table!

Slowly the boys outgrew stories and poems read by me (and recited at the table) and moved on to devouring books by themselves. Reading books was a much more frequent activity in our home life than watching TV, and the positive effects of this was continually noted by their teachers. One of my boys won a competition once on the theme of ‘Why Are Books Better Than TV’. Simon began his essay with ‘I hardly have time to write this as the storybook I am reading is so exciting …’ The prize was a book voucher of course.

The helping Brownie

When my oldest boy was seven, I received a remarkable and unexpected gift through the power of a story.

Simply entitled ‘The Brownies’, it was the next story to read to Kieren at bedtime. Taken from a collection of ‘Golden Pathway’ storybooks, the extra story was sometimes a treat for him once his two younger brothers had fallen asleep. ‘The Brownies’ injected a healing boost of energy and joy into my then difficult life as a mother of three young children.

The Brownies story was about two boys whose mother had died and whose father was struggling to raise them on his own. To do this he needed to work in his job during the day and do all the cooking and cleaning at night and early in the morning.

One day Grandma came for a visit and the oldest son asked her why his father was always so cross and unpleasant. Grandma replied that it was probably because the Brownies hadn’t come to live in the house to help him do his work!

The boy wanted to know where he could find the Brownies to invite them back to the house to help do the work and make his father happy. Grandma replied that only the wise old owl in the forest knew where they lived. Then Grandma went home.

That night the boy had a restless sleep, and eventually decided in the dark hours of the early morning to go into the forest to find the wise old owl. He crept out of the house and along the forest path, and when he found the owl he told him his problem and asked where the Brownies lived.

The owl told him to follow the path back to the lake, stand on the edge of the water in the light of the moon, then say the following riddle to himself. He assured him that when he did this and solved the answer to the riddle, he would find out about the Brownies.

Twist me and turn me and show me the elf,
I look in the water and I see …

The boy did this and of course saw his reflection. Straight away he knew that he was the one who should be the Brownie doing the jobs. He crept back to the house and while it was still dark he set to work, cleaning the kitchen, preparing the fire and sweeping the floor. Just as it was getting light, he crept back to his room. He lay in his bed listening to the joyous cries of his father who had reached the kitchen and was so happy to find his work had been done – ‘Oh happy day, the Brownies have come to stay!’

I only read the story to Kieren once. The next morning I woke in the dark to a scratching kind of sound coming from the bathroom. My first thought was that I had left the window open and a possum had come in and fallen into the bathtub. I climbed out of bed and made my way up the hall. On turning the corner to go into the bathroom I felt utter amazement. There was my seven-year-old son, kneeling in the bath, with a tub of Ajax cleanser in one hand and a nail-brush in the other hand, scrubbing away, backwards and forwards …

I crept back to bed, feeling absolutely astounded and elated and yes, as in the story, very happy. I lay there for twenty minutes – Kieren was already showing signs of ‘perfectionism’ at his young age of seven, and was obviously eager to give the bath a really good clean. Finally I heard him creeping back to his room.

‘I’ll play out the story,’ I thought, so I left my bed and reached the bathroom, announcing in quite a loud voice, ‘Oh happy day, the Brownies have come to stay!’ This was very easy to say as my bath was gleaming in the early morning light, and cleaning bathrooms was always last on my list of household tasks. I then went into the kitchen to start breakfast chores and when Kieren joined me a few minutes later he didn’t say a word and neither did I. He just glowed with joy and so did I!

For the next two weeks Kieren woke in the dark and played out the Brownie story. Every morning he would attempt a new kind of task, but obviously was running out of ideas as after a while he just kept scrubbing the cupboard doors in the kitchen. As I was worried that the paint was going to get scrubbed off, I started to leave hints for new jobs … putting my shoes on the cupboard at night with the shoe brush and polish next to them … leaving some dishes in the sink to be washed in the morning …

We never spoke about this, and a few months later, after a particularly busy day, I slumped down in my chair and said, within earshot of Kieren, ‘Oh how I wish the Brownies would come back to help again’. Well they did, but only for a few days, and then it was never mentioned again. I had to be very careful not to put too much pressure on this little worker.

To this day I will never know why or how this story had such a deep effect on Kieren. Was I perhaps the cross parent like the father in the story? Or did solving the riddle make a deep impact on this young boy? Certainly the story contained a remarkable journey for any listener. Instead of grandma or the wise owl telling the boy he needed to help his father, the boy had to discover this for himself. Many years on, when Kieren was in his late twenties, I pulled out the story and we chatted about his memories of these events. Interestingly enough, he only had vague memories of the story, but he certainly had strong recollections of doing the ‘Brownie’ jobs and his delight in keeping them secret.

Car tales and tangled knots

Children often have to be buckled into the back seat of a car for a long distance trip. Anyone who has lived in the vast continents of Australia and Africa will understand the amount of travelling hours that children have to sit still for.

As well as utilising various car games and car crafts that I had in my ‘parent resource kit’, driving for hours on end gave a chance for me to practise storytelling. I started with my favourite ones from childhood, for the practical reason that I would be able to remember most, if not all, of the story. I remember feeling quite nervous the first time I tried this, but clutching the steering wheel and staring straight ahead gave me some kind of confidence. The quietness in the back seat as the listening kicked in certainly encouraged me to continue.

On these long trips, the general healing power of storytelling influenced all of us. Three usually very active boys entered into active imagination and forgot, for the duration of the stories, to wriggle and tease and fight. And I would arrive at our destination less haggard and harried. When I shared this with an older friend she said, ‘I know all about this. I learnt it from my grandmother. When I used to take my children mountain climbing I would ‘story’ them to the top and back down again’.

I have since read about this wisdom in the culture of the Bushman peoples of Southern Africa. They can wander the desert for many days, ‘storying’ their children along, telling tales about the hill in the distance, the rocks in the gully, the evening star rising over the sand dunes…

Quite often, the power of humour helped here. A niggle-naggle-knot-man was created to help these ‘sitting’ situations. He had various adventures that were sometimes made up by the child himself, or with ideas prompted by one of my poems:

First he’s here, then he’s there, but can you see him anywhere?
The wind blows him here, the wind blows him there,
The wind sometimes blows him into your hair,
The fishermen find he’s been into their lines,
He’s into the sewing threads all the time!
First he’s here, then he’s there, but can you see him anywhere?

With the nits and lice checks, it also helped to work through different versions of a ‘naming’ game that I remembered from my childhood. On the hill behind Tamworth, the country town that was my birthplace, I would sit in a large pepper tree with my friends and we would rename everything and everyone we could think of who lived in the town below:

RIVER bombiver stickeliver fifiver,
Fifiver stickeliver that’s how you say RIVER!
JASON bombason stickelason fifason
Fifason stickelason that’s how you say JASON
MRS SMITH bombith stickelith fifith
Fifith stickelith that’s how you say MRS SMITH!

My boys loved using this as a chance to name all the other children in their class who also might have nits. When we ran out of children’s names, we moved onto their teachers’ names (they delighted in this!). Then, if more time was needed, we moved onto the objects in the room and outside the window. This would allow for plenty of hair-checking time.

Travelling through the wardrobe

Reflecting on the joys and trials involved in raising three sons, I am struck by the ‘balancing’ effect of their rich diet of nature and folk tales on their choices of play and recreational activities. Alongside the typical ‘boy’ weapon play with bows, arrows, guns and spears, and their sporting interests in skateboarding, cricket, football and surfing, there was always plenty of time spent on travelling ‘through the wardrobe’ into vast realms of imaginative play.

Recent discussions with all three have shown that these times formed some of their happiest memories. The local creeks were explored and re-explored for magic crystals, pirate hideouts were constructed in rock caves on the beach front, and miniature houses with intricate rooms and pathways were built in back corners of our garden for the ‘little folk’ to live in.

A strong memory of my middle son, Simon, concerns these little houses. When he was eight years old, we moved from our rented home to our ‘bought’ home. The first thing he did when we arrived with the furniture, was to lead his brothers out into the backyard and quickly build a new house for the fairies to move into – they were convinced that the fairies had followed the furniture truck!

The three boys also have special memories of the ‘knocking-door tree’ forest near my kindergarten (see next chapter), with the magic doors in the trees. Many years later, my youngest son and his friends spent an evening revisiting this forest to celebrate a twenty-first birthday.

Imaginative play and the ‘little folk’

Throughout the boys’ childhood I encouraged their imaginative play by providing simple resources. I saved large cardboard boxes and timber off-cuts for den building, and old clothes for dressing up. At garage sales I found hammers and digging picks for crystal hunting, and always tried to leave a good part of the garden ‘untamed’ for hiding places, tree houses and magic buildings for the ‘little folk’.

For fear of it becoming sentimental, I was careful never to prompt any talk about ‘fairies’ or ‘nature spirits’. But nor was it in the least discouraged. In fact I found myself listening to the boys’ comments with intense curiosity. At a young age, my son Simon used to describe in limited, three-year-old detail the fairies that lived, alongside the monkeys, in our garden in South Africa. He would come and sit next to me on the grass that sloped down to the forest and chat away about what he could see. I was in awe at what I was hearing, and was very careful never to judge or label what he was sharing with me. These moments are still sacred memories – when a child’s imaginative perception enriched my own.

As a child I am convinced that I could see ‘dancing spirits’ in the garden. I don’t remember them looking like the typical fairies found in children’s picture books, but more like dancing balls of light with vague faces and limbs. Because of these memories, combined with further reading on nature spirits and elemental beings,ii I have never questioned the existence of the ‘little folk’ immortalised in myth, legend, and children’s stories. I am sure that as a young child I was seeing some of these ‘beings’.

I could also see ‘things’ in the dark. My memory of this is quite clear. My older brother and I used to lie in bed and discuss what we could see, and more often than not we saw similar things. One night I saw an extremely scary shape in the doorway and cried out for my parents. The response was very disappointing – my father scolded me for talking nonsense, and told me to go to sleep. I never mentioned my ‘sightings’ to any one again, and yet the memory of these things stayed with me.ⁱⁱⁱ

It may be hard for adults to engage with this realm of childhood perception, but it is nevertheless often a reality for children, and something of course which comes alive in many folk and fairytales. Rather than insisting that children see the world as we do, we can learn from them something we often forget – that nature is alive and ensouled, full of dynamic energies and vital, often unperceived realities.

Imaginative family traditions

When my eldest lost his first tooth, the current tradition as practised by families in our neighbourhood was to replace the tooth with a $1 or $2 coin. I thought about this and the materialistic basis of such a tradition, and decided to try something simpler and more imaginative. Instead of a dollar coin, the tooth fairies left a tiny shell instead. The comment made by my excited six-year-old boy in the early hours of the morning still rings in my ears – ‘I knew the real tooth fairies wouldn’t leave money!’

This seal of approval from an innocent child started a simple family tradition – for each tooth lost a natural treasure was left in its place (a shell, crystal, feather, etc). As an end to this was needed eventually, a special treasure box was left out with the seventh tooth, with a note suggesting its use as a home for the accumulated treasures. Decades later these little boxes, with their simple contents, are still kept as treasured memories.

An imaginative approach was also used to solve the question for my youngest – ‘Is Santa really true?’ This is a common question for families with younger children who hear comments from their older siblings who have outgrown such beliefs. One Christmas I sensed this was starting to happen in our household. Jamie was still at the tender age of five. I told a bedtime story to his older brothers to try to help the situation. This story was about Santa being a ‘giving spirit’ that enters children when they are old enough to be able to make their own gifts. They were so inspired by this that they set to work writing a list of every relative and distant family friend they could think of. Then a multitude of presents were made, wrapped and put under the Christmas tree – packets of hand-made cards, pots of jam, candles, bookmarks, etc. Needless to say, Jamie stopped hearing anything negative about Santa! Two years later he was also ready to hear about the ‘giving spirit’.

I recently heard from a friend of mine, who grew up in a German/ Serbian family of ten children, that her mother used a tradition of bringing home a special cake with each new baby. The cake was a light sponge with jam and cream, unlike any other kind of cake the children were used to eating. The children waiting at home were told that it was ‘cake brought by the new baby from heaven’. They all looked forward to this, and greatly treasured the eating process (my friend said she would take several days to eat her piece!). In this way, each new child was received by the rest of the family in awe and wonder. My friend has no memory of ever being jealous or resentful of each new baby joining the family.

It is interesting to research and reflect upon the wisdom of family traditions and practices. Parents may gain imaginative insights from discussions with their own grandparents and great grandparents. My own grandmother, of strong Yorkshire stock, thought that if a child fell and hurt her knee,iv or was upset about something, then the best thing to do was to carry on working while singing a song with many verses. If, at the end of the song, the child was still upset, then it might be significant enough to attend to. My grandmother felt this approach was so effective because the imaginative content of the song usually captured the child’s interest and helped her forget about why she was upset.

Poetry and creativity

As well as encouraging imaginative play and traditions, a rich diet of stories and poems has given the three boys a significant sensitivity to language. Since their early teens, they have enjoyed writing poetry, especially for special events. Over many years, a poem from one or more of my boys has been the main gift for my birthday. I keep a small treasure chest at home full of these loveliest memories.

My youngest son has recently decorated the walls of his flat with his travel photos and snippets of poetic writing, and his spirited approach to life is imbued with creativity. My middle son has a sensitive talent for writing and presentation. At a recent community event, he had the audience almost in tears as he described his life story viewed through his love of shell collecting.

My eldest, now touring the world as a professional surfer, often brings poetic metaphor into his articles submitted to surfing magazines. This pro-surfer proposed to his wife in a most creative way. He took her to the beach at sunrise and drew a heart in the sand for her to stand inside. Then he dived into the ocean and surfaced in front of his beloved lady with a sparkling ring in his hand … an engagement inspired by fairytales!

Bottles and bubbles

My first experience as a parent story-maker arose from an unusual stimulus. Up to this time I had always read or told other people’s stories to my children.

Jamie, at three years old, hated having his hair washed, and I mean ‘hated’ with a capital H! Because it was such a traumatic experience for both of us, hair washing day, that had been a matter of course for his two older brothers, was put off as long as possible for Jamie. Finally my pride as a parent would take over, and I would try to sneak the hair washing into general bath time, but inevitably tense periods of loud screaming would ensue.

It was during one of these screaming sessions that I had a brilliant idea, although the credit for the brilliance should really go to the manufacturer of the baby shampoo. Instead of the usual bottle-shape, this particular manufacturer had chosen to package the product in a bottle shaped like a bear.

As I picked up the shampoo bottle, a crazy story started to race around my head, and eventually found its way out of my mouth and into Jamie’s ears. If you are thinking I must have screamed the story, you are right! But only for the first few sentences, for as Jamie’s ears opened the screaming stopped.

And so the simple story of Shampoo-the-Bear was born. Shampoo-the-Bear had countless adventures as he travelled through the forest, along the river, and into many towns. Everyone he met on his way would greet him with a friendly hello… but every time Shampoo-the-Bear opened his mouth to say hello back, bubbles would come out instead of words.

Shampoo-the-Bear totally transformed hair-washing time. In fact Jamie wanted to hear more and more stories about this remarkable character, and, for a while, hair washing was happening almost every other day. Of course the stories could only happen at hair washing time – I needed to open the bottle first before a story would come out – ‘parent wisdom’ practised here! For the times between, the bottle was kept on a very high shelf.

‘Cloud Boy’ wins a healing victory

One of my most difficult times as a parent was when my two older boys were at school and my youngest still had a year to wait. This could have been wonderful for quality time together, but because Jamie was born wanting to be number one in the family, he often could not accept being the youngest – especially in this last year before he went to school. Every morning when Jamie’s brothers left to catch the bus, I had to draw on all my creative talents to distract him from getting upset and angry. And I must confess that my patience and creativity were wearing thin.

To add to this difficulty, Jamie’s fifth birthday was coming up, and he desperately wanted a ‘Masters of the Universe’ warrior doll for his special day. This doll was sold to advertise the television show of the same name. It was made from grey rubber and had scars on its face and weapons at its belt. Jamie always prefaced his request by saying, ‘All my friends have one!’ Yet as a reasonably protective mother I wanted my son to have a less aggressive doll to play with and sleep with.

One week before his birthday I found a soft cuddly doll in a craft shop that reminded me of Jamie – it had a lovely petite face, white-blond hair and a little blue suit – Jamie’s favourite colour. Jamie will love this, I thought, and I promptly purchased it and wrapped it for his special day. But on the morning of his birthday, when Jamie unwrapped a doll that was not the expected ‘Masters of the Universe’ version, he was so angry he threw his present on the floor and stormed out of the room.

Without giving too much detail, the next few weeks could be numbered amongst the most unbearable in my parenting life. Jamie was so angry with me! Yet I was determined not to give in to the commercial pressure that tries to invade our homes and private lives in so many insidious ways. A stalemate had developed, and just when there seemed no solution, I decided to try to heal the rift with a story – one inspired by the little doll that now lived in my bedroom cupboard.

For three nights, as Jamie was falling asleep, I stood by his top bunk and in a very nonchalant way, started to talk to him about a little child called Cloud Boy. I had to do this in quite a casual manner. Jamie had been very reluctant to join in any of our family rituals, including bedtime story, since his traumatic birthday.

Cloud Boy was a child who lived in the clouds in his cloud home, slept on a soft cloud bed, and ate cloud pancakes for dinner. Cloud Boy had hair the colour of white clouds, and wore a suit the blue of the sky. For a long time, Cloud Boy was very happy living up in the sky all by himself. But one day his cloud home floated close to the earth and he could see little children, just about his size, playing in the fields and the gardens in the world below. Cloud Boy then decided that he wanted to come down to the world and have a friend to live with and play with. Every day he would travel across the sky in his cloud home, over the tops of the forests, along the rivers and over the mountains … all around the world. He was looking for a friend who would play with him and look after him …but where could such a friend be found?

By the third night, Jamie had forgotten his reluctance to engage in the bedtime ritual, and was showing great interest in this simple story. On this night the story had ended with the open question, ‘Where could such a friend be found?’

Once Jamie was asleep, I crept into his room and stretched a long piece of white muslin to hang under his top bunk. I then carefully placed the little doll into the ‘cloud’ within full view of the ladder that Jamie would be climbing down the next morning. Later that evening I crawled into bed, not knowing if my story was going to help or make a change, but at least knowing that it had engaged Jamie’s interest at bedtime.

My memory of the next day still brings tears to my eyes. I was woken by my youngest son, tugging at my elbow, saying excitedly, ‘Mummy, Cloud Boy chose me to be his friend!’ And when I looked out from my bed, there was Jamie, cradling Cloud Boy in his arms and beaming with joy.

This doll then became my son’s closest companion, and life at home was transformed. Everywhere that Jamie went, Cloud Boy went with him. When Jamie was given new gumboots, red felt boots were made for Cloud Boy. When Jamie started school, a backpack was sewn for Cloud Boy and a matchbox was filled with raisins for his lunch and put into the backpack. And of course, for the next few years, Cloud Boy slept in Jamie’s bed every night. Around the age of nine, Jamie carefully placed him in a basket in his cupboard.

Many years later, when Jamie was studying at university for his Bachelor of Design, he was home visiting me before I left for work in East Africa. He saw me wrapping up Cloud Boy with other toys and books. I was putting them all in a box to be stored away for three years. Jamie was horrified that I could do this to his lifetime friend, and he took Cloud Boy back to Sydney in his backpack. Cloud Boy now lives on Jamie’s bed in his flat along with his girlfriend’s favourite cuddly toy from her childhood … both waiting for children to come and play with them!

The moment Cloud Boy entered Jamie’s life, his desire for the warrior doll disappeared. Jamie’s friends would come and join in tea parties with Cloud Boy and wish they had such a friend too. Cloud Boy became part of our family life in so many ways – he even features on several pages in the family photo album. Jamie recently commented that he thought Cloud Boy, together with all the craftwork and puppetry that was associated with the stories from his childhood, has made an important impact on his design work as an adult. He loves and seeks beautiful things, especially natural forms and materials.

ⁱ	When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six (see reference section for details)
ⁱⁱ	See book by Rudolf Steiner in the reference section
ⁱⁱⁱ	I have since discovered that if these childhood experiences had happened in a country like Iceland they might have been more accepted by the adults. In this northern country of rock and ice, the ‘Hidden Folk’ (elves, gnomes, trolls and other spirits) apparently enjoy a natural regard. Proof of these little folk being a widespread phenomenon can be found in stories carried by local newspapers – for instance about humans attempting to construct houses or roads on ‘elf’ rocks and landforms, and suffering inexplicable set-backs. Some of Iceland’s most renowned seers of the ‘hidden people’ have devised ‘elf’ maps of their principal habitations, and give normal people an insight into the lives and whereabouts of these beings. Describing them as the ‘other side’ of nature, comparable to light on the trees and the flowers (whose surroundings dictate the form they take), they believe the elves want people to preserve nature. According to such seers, most children have a natural ability to perceive the ‘little folk’.
^iv	Rather than the awkwardness of using both gender forms, I will alternate between them.

3

Weaving Stories into the Teaching Fabric

As well as being central to my family life, the healing light of stories has interwoven with my professional life – from early childhood education to teacher training, counselling work and parent support programmes, in both Australia and Africa.

In this chapter I describe my journey and struggles as a teacher and counsellor to create stories for diverse behaviours and situations. The examples progress through early years teaching, the lower primary grades, and into my adult counselling work. They have been chosen to illustrate a range of approaches to story making. The full stories relating to each example can be found later in the book. There are also ‘tip’ boxes, included here to help enthusiastic storywriters. The following section, ‘Writing Therapeutic Stories’ explores story making and story structure in a more systematic and detailed way.

Poetry leads to story making

After several years devoted to fulltime parenting, both in Africa and Australia, I re-entered the work force by founding a kindergarten on Australia’s north-east coast. Story time was the ‘heart’ of the day, and stories were mostly brought to life through telling, not reading (the subject of ‘storytelling’ is addressed in more depth at the end of the book). In planning my story programme, I sourced folk tales from all over the world, and slowly experimented with writing simple nature stories for my groups of children. As my kindergarten was in a little town close to a forest, many of my first nature stories were forest tales.

At first my writing started with simple poetry. I never imagined back then that I could actually write a whole story! Writing poetry had been an enjoyable hobby since my teenage years, and a way to express feelings and frustrations. So without any planning, poetry rekindled an imaginative fire in me and quite naturally became my springboard into story making.

One of my poems grew out of a need to keep control of my class on a nature walk. I had decided to take my kindergarten group on their first excursion to the forest close to the school. As we reached the path that led through the trees, the group scattered in every direction, some children even reaching the other side of the forest, right by the main road. With the help of my assistant, I spent the next twenty minutes frantically rounding up the group and then we hastily led them back to school. What I hoped would be a pleasant bushwalk turned into a wild and scary experience for a fledgling teacher!

Before considering any more bushwalks in my kindergarten programme, I visited the forest by myself, desperate for some creative ideas. As I reached the path, I noticed a large tree with what looked like a ‘door’ at the bottom. This gave me ideas for a poem about a ‘Knocking-Door-Tree’, and over the following months and years, the poem led to many stories. One of the Knocking-Door-Tree Forest Stories, ‘Jaden and the Fairy Eggs’, is included later in the book (see page 205).

I know a little secret about a Knocking-Door-Tree,
A Knocking-Door-Tree that waits for you and waits for me.
At the edge of a forest of shimmering green,
With a pathway that leads to where the little folk are seen.

Knock three times, no more, just three,
Then wait together by the Knocking-Door-Tree.
And if together very quietly you wait,
The little folk may come and open up their magic gate!

After that first ‘wild’ experience, I would gather the class near the tree before any walk through the forest, and recite the poem. This made an enormous difference to the mood of the bushwalk. Without any prompting from me, the children would all delight in taking turns ‘knocking’ on the door, with the older ones making sure the younger ones didn’t knock more than three times! Then I would cup my hand over my ear and say, ‘Listen, I can hear the gate opening. Follow me and we shall see what we shall see’. This ensured that I was always the leader and the wild running was channelled into careful walking and watching. We would see lizards, birds, butterflies and dragonflies, and the children were sure they often saw little folk dancing in the sunbeams shining through the trees. In this way we were able to spend much longer times enjoying the forest. Then I was able to deliver the children safely back to the school, often stopping at the park where they could have time to climb and swing and run freely within a safe, fenced area.

The use of poetry and simple rhyme, as well as being a springboard into story making, has since been incorporated in many ways into my story writing. I quickly learnt from telling stories to groups of young children that it was often the repetition and rhyme that kept their concentration. Afterwards the children would take the rhyme into their play in many helpful and healing ways. One example here is the story of ‘Benjie and the Turnip’ (see page 196). I have seen how its simple rhymes have a powerful effect on children when playing in the garden. Children who may have been tempted to pull up the vegetables and pluck the flowers at random, have been beautifully restrained by this story and have been overheard asking ‘Gnome, gnome, good root gnome, may I take your ‘turnip’ (or ‘carrot’ or ‘flower’) home?’ I then watch as they bend down to listen to a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’. If necessary, I may whisper from behind, speaking on behalf of the plant, ‘Not yet, it’s still mine, try again another time!’ In a jolly and rhythmical way, this story teaches the deep wisdom of indigenous peoples who have always appreciated their strong connection to the land and its produce. The wisdom is about asking first, and then thanking Mother Earth for her bountiful goodness. Quite a lesson for our snatch-and-grab materialistic age!

STORY TIP
Use poetry as a springboard into story writing. Write your own poems or take a classic poem or nursery rhyme and turn it into a small story. Allow rhyme and repetition to become an integral part of the story.

From the forest to the sea

After years of fundraising and building, my kindergarten finally moved out of rented premises into a permanent home, away from the forest and closer to the beach. Although we continued to pay return visits to the ‘knocking-door-tree forest’ for school excursions, with the move to the coast the focus of my nature stories slowly changed to sea-side tales.

My inspirations often came from walking on the beach, sitting on the headland looking out to sea or paddling in the rockpools. I am convinced that what the Bushmen People of Southern Africa say is true: ‘A story is like the wind, it comes from a far-off place and you feel it’.i To get inspiration for a story it so often helps to be out in nature – where you can feel the story winds blowing!

One year, just before Christmas, I was walking along the beach when a tumbleweed came rolling down from the sand-dunes. A little child was running behind trying to catch it. In an instant, I had an idea for a story. The tumbleweed looked so much like a grass star, and reminded me of the rolling and tumbling group of boys in my kindergarten. I had recently seen a grass star used by a friend as an Australian summer Christmas decoration (with gold glitter sprinkled in the centre and hung from the rafters on her verandah). These images swirled in my head, along with the classic rhyme and sequencing pattern of ‘The Gingerbread Man’ story.

STORY TIP
Use a theme from a classic and well-loved children’s story to help construct your own story

Finally my ‘Grass Star Man’ story was born (see page 202), and used that year, and for many years later, as one of the Christmas stories in the kindergarten. In brief, it was about a little old woman who was trying to catch a grass star on the beach. But the grass star didn’t want to be caught, he was on his way back up to the sky!

Play, play – no, not I, I’m on my way back up to the sky,
I’ve no time to play for fun, I belong back up with the sun –
Run, run, run as fast as you can,
You can’t catch me – I’m the grass star man!

And he continued rolling along the sand – roly-poly, tumble-bumble, over and over, with the little old woman running after him (soon to be joined by a dog, a crab and some fishermen).

The wild tumbling and restlessness is eventually transformed into stillness and satisfaction, and the little old woman takes the grass star home to hang in her house ‘as a Christmas light on Christmas night’.

Interestingly enough, the ‘Grass Star Man’ story was a real favourite of my rolling, tumbling group of boys. It was the first story of the term that held them in full concentration and stillness, from the first to the last word. This story-time concentration also reached into other daily activities, a small healing in itself.

STORY TIP
Find inspiration in nature. Go walking on a beach or in a forest. Sit quietly in a garden and observe the pulsing life and busy-ness of the natural world.

The patterns, rhythms and metaphors in the natural world can offer unlimited ideas for storymaking. I was once collecting tiny pebbles on the beach, thinking, as I stuffed them into the pocket of my skirt, that I might use these for a puppet show one day. The following week I was driving home and saw by the side of the road an upside-down tree root. It was clean and shiny from the rain, and when turned upright its roots formed a space underneath that looked like a little house. My boys helped me lift it into the boot of the car and deliver it to the kindergarten. These items from nature set my imagination swirling. With the collected nature props, and focusing on the need for a ‘sensible sweeping’ story for my older children (who had been getting quite wild at cleanup time), my ‘Little Straw Broom’ puppet show came into being (see page 220).

This broom story has been used with great success and appreciation with all ages of children and adults. I have told it to eight- and nine-year-olds, and afterwards had the class delight in making it into a picture book. I once performed it as a one-person play on stage at an adult storytelling festival. The common consequence of the story is that the listeners start ‘itching’ to sweep – I have had many parents from my kindergarten ask me ‘Why is my child coming home and wanting to know where the broom is?’ I have also had both a mother and a father say to me how this story helped them review their share of effort in relation to domestic chores.

STORY TIP
Collect props from nature both to inspire your story making and to use with your storytelling – seedpod boats, shells, nuts, acorns, feathers, bamboo and driftwood – the patterns, shapes and textures in the natural world offer unlimited ideas as props for story themes.

A fire story to heal trauma

Sometimes a specific situation seems to dictate a story line. One day at pre-school a normally very settled four-year-old boy arrived like a whirlwind. Matthew proceeded to knock things over and tip things upside-down, and playtime was extremely challenging for all concerned.

His mother, while putting her son’s bag into his locker, explained that the previous evening a fire in the home had burnt half their house down. Matthew and his family had escaped to the garden and watched all the bedrooms burn to the ground. His mother had tried to explain to her son that the house was covered by insurance and they would be able to re-build soon, but of course Matthew had been deeply affected by the whole experience. That morning at school, Matthew’s behaviour was like the flames of a fire!

Finally it was lunchtime followed by our daily rest, and Matthew fell fast asleep, totally exhausted. While lying down with the children an idea for a story came to me, a story that I thought might help Matthew understand, in a more imaginative way, the traumatic event of the previous evening.

Rabbits were Matthew’s favourite animals so I chose a rabbit family for the main characters in the story. My simple story line was about a bushfire that swept quickly across a grassy field and left the baby rabbits sleeping safely deep down in their burrow. After the fire it took several weeks for the green grass to grow again but soon the babies were once again frolicking and jumping around in their grassy playground. My message, through the use of metaphor, was twofold – the rabbit children were safe, and slowly their environment was returned to normal. This story proved to be an example of the powerful effect of using an imaginative rather than a rational explanation for a young child.

I waited until Matthew had woken up, and then gathered the whole group of children for a story time on the veranda, just before the parents arrived. Even though there was no time to ‘polish’ the story, the whole group loved it, and for the next two weeks they asked to hear it over and over again. The story also had an immediate and remarkable effect on Matthew. When his mother arrived a few minutes later he ran to meet her at the gate and patted her on the arm and said, ‘Don’t worry Mummy, everything’s going to be alright!’ She looked at me and said, ‘What have you done, Susan?’ I suggested that she call me later that night when her children were asleep and I would tell her a story. Which I did! I have included the story later in the book, entitled ‘Mother Rabbit and the Bushfire’ (see page 230).

STORY TIP
Don’t be afraid to try out an idea – a story doesn’t always have to be ‘in print’ and ‘polished’ to be effective!

A wild pony story

‘Restless Red Pony’ was written for a four-year-old boy who was exhibiting wild behaviour in a childcare environment. He would run around kicking and hitting other children and found it hard to keep still. He also didn’t like being touched, and would lash out at anyone who came near him. The teaching staff felt he needed one-to-one supervision for the safety of the group, and they also started to confiscate his boots so that if he kicked out his bare feet would do less damage to those close to him.

I was called into the childcare centre in an advisory role, and found the boy on the veranda making great protests about having his boots taken off. I sat down and admired the shiny brown boots, and he started to tell me that these were cowboy boots and how one day he wished he could have his own horse. This gave me the idea for the main metaphor in the story that I wrote later that week. The boy loved horses and soaked up the images (see page 199).

The teacher told the story many times, and, following my suggestion, chose to finish each day with a pony game. This game encouraged the children one by one to gallop round the circle then take their place in the centre to be stroked and brushed by all the others – just like restless red pony. The wild boy was one of the first to want to lie down and be brushed. This contact game helped to break the pattern of his aggression.

The story has a general use for kindergarten teachers with groups of boisterous and/or restless children. Of course such behaviour also needs other strategies. With the boy mentioned above, the teachers had to take off his boots to prevent him hurting other children with his wild kicks. A home visit helped understand the problem, and built some consistent approaches between home and school. A copy of the story was also given to the boy’s parents to read to him at home.

STORY TIP:
Often we get our best ideas from the children. Listen to their interests, hopes and wishes. Try to incorporate these into your choice of metaphors and journey when writing a story for a specific child or group (refer to the story writing section for more ideas here)

A simple shoe story

In the late 1990s I was working as a field worker for the Centre for Creative Education in Cape Town. This involved visits to the ‘Educare’ pre-school centres in the townships and squatter camps. My task was to write reports about the trainees, which included some older and more experienced teachers. At one particular school the unspoken feeling with the older woman in charge was that any critical comment I made could affect our friendship, and stir up complex racial issues.

However, there was a glaringly obvious situation that needed attention – fifty pairs of shoes and boots thrown in a pile by the children outside the kindergarten door at rest-time. A teacher then took more than half an hour to sort out the shoes for the children before home time. Instead of making any comment to the head teacher, I made up the following simple story to offer the children (see ‘Tembe’s Boots’ on page 118). The idea came from looking down at my own pair of red boots, which looked like ‘friends together’. The head teacher loved the story and continued telling it to the children. From that time on, without any prompting, the older children placed the shoes on the veranda together in beautiful order. Out of pure imitation, the younger ones soon joined in, and the shoe-sorting teacher was able to take a much-needed break instead.

On my next visit to this centre, my first sight was a long line of shoes neatly placed along the veranda. A new and very healthy habit had been established for the children. I have since used this story with many other pre-school and school groups to help establish a shoes-together habit in the first week of the year. It could also have value for families who prefer a ‘shoes-off’ at the door approach.

STORY TIP
An effective story theme can often be simpler than you think!

Environmental healing tales

An example of a healing story on a universal theme for all age groups is one that I wrote for World Environment Day in 1992. This was then turned into a one-hour musical play by ‘Home Grown Productions’, Byron Bay, and toured through many primary schools. Entitled ‘Garden of Light’ (see page 127), it is an example of how drama can strengthen the healing aspect of storytelling.

The play was created in cooperation with the local Seed Saver’s Network which provided packet of seeds for the children in the audience to take home and plant in their gardens. The story line had quite a powerful effect on the audience. I watched adults wiping away tears. One class of seven-year-olds, who were meant to be going to the beach after watching the play, insisted that their teacher take them in the bus back to the school so they could start to prepare some gardens and plant their seeds immediately!

The central metaphor for this story is a great golden ball that can shine light into the world only when it is polished each day by the Nature Weaver (using a cloth woven from fresh grasses, flowers and leaves). When King-Didn’t-Care comes along and destroys the natural environment, there is nothing left to make a polishing cloth to polish the ball. The ball turns a tarnished grey and the King orders a high stone wall to be built around it to keep it out of sight. When the wall is completed the king starts to turn ‘grey’ and grows very ill.

The metaphor of the golden ball symbolised for me the universal source of life. Hence when the ball loses its golden shine and the King tries to hide its ugliness, the ‘greyness’ and imbalance surfaces in him. This loss can never really be hidden or suppressed. Only the innocence and enthusiasm of the children, combined with the wisdom and patience of the Nature Weaver, Mother Earth, could restore the balance.

Many adults saw the play and had different interpretations of the metaphors. The golden ball to some was the divine source or ‘God’; to others it was the connector of all things; to others our ‘spiritual conscience’. The Nature Weaver was understood by some as a ‘God’ or ‘Goddess’, by others as a symbol of the modern environmental movement. These different interpretations emphasise how a story has a life of its own.

Of course, with the young children, it is best not to give or ask for interpretations – this could kill the magic! However, with older primary school and high school ages, the story could be effectively used as a springboard for environmental lessons and debates.

Another example of an environmental healing story is ‘Grandmother and the Donkey’ (see page 123). Its gentler theme and shorter, simpler journey makes it more suitable for the pre-school and kindergarten ages. Written to encourage litter awareness in Cape Town in 1997, it was toured as a puppet show through kindergartens in the townships. The healing effect of the story on the children was immediate – after each performance, as I and Maria Msbenzi, the other puppeteer, were packing up the show, the children would run up to us with handfuls of litter collected from their school playground. Each day we found that we had to take extra bags and boxes in our car to carry all the garbage.

STORY TIP
Turning a story into a play or puppet show can strengthen the message and healing potential

Knitting needles and pocket knives

Even though I have mainly taught in early childhood situations, I have sometimes been called in for relief teaching or for craft teaching at local primary schools. No matter what the subject, telling a story has been my way into the lesson.

One of my most successful experiences was in a series of knitting lessons with 8-year-olds. I had only had one session previous to this with the class, and I found them to be the wildest group of 8-year-olds I had ever met. There were 23 children in the class, 17 were boys, and they were climbing on desks and through the windows when I first walked in.

My plan was to have the children first make their own ‘bush’ knitting needles – using dowel rods, sharpened at one end with a pencil sharpener, sanded smooth, and a gum-nut glued on the other end. But I was concerned they would start fighting with the knitting needles, or think that knitting was ‘un-cool’ and not be interested in joining in the lesson.

After much thought (and a sleepless night!) I made up a story about two ‘magic sticks’ that were found by a boy who was always very bored and up to no good. Entitled ‘Jeremy and the Magic Sticks’ (see page 162), it was my recounting of the terrible things that this boy did to hurt others that first got the attention of the class. After a series of incidents in the story, a set of ‘magic’ sticks helped this boy make many amazing things, and whenever he had the sticks with him, with the help of a ball of wool, he was never bored again.

This story captured the imagination of every member of the class. They couldn’t wait to make their own ‘magic sticks’ and, like the boy in the story, knitted amazing things. The knitting lessons for the rest of the term became their favourite time of the week.

My strongest memory of the lessons was the preparation of the knitting needles. The children had to sand their sticks until they were extremely smooth. They had to come out to my desk and rub them against my cheek until I agreed that they felt like velvet. Not once did any of the children try to hurt other children with their precious ‘magic’ sticks. The story had ‘healed’ the difficult behaviour and settled the whole class into productive work.

STORY TIP:
Use a story to introduce a lesson (no matter what the subject!). The story will help to create an imaginative connection to the topic and greatly increase the chance that the children will be enthused from the beginning to the end of the lesson.

Another story, ‘The Pocket Knife and the Castle’ (see page 119), written for seven- to nine-year-olds, was requested by a parent whose son was being irresponsible with tools. The story was used by the parent on the boy’s birthday to accompany his special pocket knife present. It made a noticeable difference to how the boy treated his new possession. The story tells about a knife that ‘itched’ to be used. This was emphasised by the knife having a song of its own. The repetition of the little rhyme helped to create the mood and tension, even for a boy as old as eight.

There was once a young boy who had been given a pocket knife for his birthday. A brand new pocket knife, a gleaming shining pocket knife. A very sharp pocket knife, that itched to be used.

He kept it in his pocket – and there it stayed, itching to be used.

‘I am a knife and I love to cut; Open me, use me, then shut me back up’.
The boy was sure he could hear it singing to him sometimes…

I have also successfully used this story in schools and vacation-care programmes to encourage older children to create things with their hands – in wood or clay or soapstone. The knitting needles and pocket-knife stories both show the powerful effect of a story on transforming wild and irresponsible behaviour into productive and settled activity.

STORY TIP:
Incorporate rhymes, riddles and songs into your storytelling. Their repetition helps create the mood and tension in the story. It is often the rhyme that the children remember most, even primary-aged children.

Tales from the story doctor

Another facet of my early childhood work has been parent consultation. I had the privilege of piloting a ‘Creative Parent Support’ programme for a ‘Developing Stronger Families’ project funded by the Australian Government. This work involved home visits to families and visits to local schools where I observed parents and teachers struggling with difficult situations. Often the visit was followed up by me writing a story, or encouraging the parent or teacher to write a story, to help or heal difficult behaviour.

In this role with Parent Support I often felt like a ‘story doctor’. Over a two-year period, I had many experiences with stories addressing different behaviour challenges in children. Some stories were used by teachers and effected positive change in the school environment, e.g. Restless Red Pony, and A Little Boy went Sailing. Some of the stories were written by and for parents and reached the child in their home environment – e.g.The Ball of Wool, The Magic Stick. Some stories had an influence on the whole family – e.g. Princess Light, The Beautiful Queen. Occasionally a story affected change through touching the parents’ imagination – ‘Now I get it, I need to give my child more time to be a child’ said two different parents after reading about the little brown zebra who was in a hurry to have his stripes turn black. After this feedback, ‘Impatient Zebra’ became the introduction to my talks on ‘Protecting Childhood’.

Other stories had an effect on therapist, parent and child, e.g. ‘The Farmer “Just Right”’ story helped the family psychologist use an imaginative approach with a five-year-old who climbed into cupboards to go to the toilet. The psychologist then went on to self-publish a little picture book for toileting difficulties with older children. The story helped the mother introduce more routines and consistency into family life, and the child’s behaviour was positively affected by the consistency that was now replacing chaos in the home. The child loved the farmer’s chant, ‘A place for everything and everything in its place’. He was often overheard using this with his toys at tidy-up time. This combination of strategies helped heal the ‘out-of-balance’ behaviour and the child started to use the toilet again.

These experiences increased my commitment to finding ways to include and encourage the ‘light of story’ in modern family and school life. The work then extended to running Creative Discipline courses for parents, teachers and therapists. In these courses the participants were helped to use imaginative rhymes, games and stories to meet different discipline challenges. The workshops produced some interesting and successful results, confirming for me and the participants the importance of metaphor and story in child-rearing practices. A selection of the stories from these experiences, both mine and the Creative Discipline workshop contributions, have been included in the story sections of the book.

Writing and sourcing, sifting and sorting

It was the success of all of these experiences that encouraged me to write and collect therapeutic stories and to continue to keep notes documenting their use and effect. These stories and notes have piled up in boxes and drawers, and have slowly been transferred to my trusty laptop. The final outcome is this book.

At this stage, it is probably important to point out that not all my stories have made it into print. Some stories have been scribbled or typed and then put straight into the recycle bin. Others have been put into a file to gather dust. Some of these have been reworked many years later (possibly a message here – Don’t throw any away!).

There can be many reasons why a story may not ‘work’, but it is a worthwhile experience to try, and try, and try again. I am convinced that writing dud stories (or ‘dories’) is an important part of the learning process. Occasionally a story has been so disastrous that after telling it once in my kindergarten, instead of repeating the story for several days (usually a wonderful rhythm for storytelling with young children as they thrive on repetition) I have gone back the next day and told a well-loved folk tale for the rest of the week. Perhaps the story didn’t ‘work’ because it was too long, or perhaps the story journey was too wishy-washy, or too complex? Or perhaps there was too much description and not enough activity?

The next section offers a framework for exploring the above questions, plus other aspects of story structure and many tips for story making.

ⁱ	‘A Story Like The Wind’ by Laurens van der Post (details in reference section)

SECTION TWO

WRITING THERAPEUTIC
STORIES

The aim of this section is to share a construction model for story making that has helped me and many workshop participants create healing stories for children. However, before setting off on an exploration of therapeutic story writing, some fundamental questions about ‘story’ and ‘behaviour’ need to be addressed.

4

‘Story’ and ‘Behaviour’

What is a story?

I find ‘story’ as difficult to define as a human or a tree or a rainbow. Is this because it is alive? ‘Story’, like life, is difficult to define or categorise.

You can look up the definition of ‘story’ in the dictionary, but you may find, like I did, that it is rather dry:

A piece of narrative, tale of any length told or printed in prose or verse, of actual or fictitious events…

A more ‘living’ approach is to attempt to describe story in an imaginative or metaphorical way. The following examples show that there can be many different metaphors, and they all work to enrich our understanding of what story is. After reading these, you may find it valuable to think of your own metaphor.

Some metaphors for ‘story’

As we saw in Chapter 3, the Bushmen or ‘San’ people of Southern Africa compare a story to the wind, believing that it comes from a far-away place.

This description captures the heart or ‘feeling’ connection of a storytelling experience, and seems to say much with few words. Stories are one of the Bushmen’s survival tools, influencing key actions in their daily lives, especially the hunt, and teaching about desert animals that will lead them to food and water. The connection of a story to ‘the wind’ links their imaginary world to their physical world on a daily basis.

The Xhosa women attending my early childhood training in Cape Town compared a nourishing story to a cooking pot full of healthy food. They found this metaphor a wonderful one to use when trying to list the ingredients needed for the ‘pot’ to write (cook up) a ‘nourishing’ story for children. They suggested that there could even be a second bowl or pot that contains all the spices that one could add to a story – humour, a riddle, ‘magic’, a song or rhyme.

Images of ‘water’, with its many linking metaphors, are a wonderful way to describe the nature of story. Stories are as important to our soul life as water is to our physical well-being – they can rejuvenate and are vital for healthy growth and development; they find their way right into our hearts, into our being, just as water can find a way in through a crack in the wall when nothing else can! Many stories together make a ‘well’ for life’s travellers to dip into and continue on their journey enlivened and refreshed.

Another metaphor for ‘story’ is ‘medicine’. C.P. Estes, in her book Women who run with the Wolves, uses story medicine in helping women reconnect with their instinctual selves. Anita Johnston, in her book Eating in the Light of the Moon, uses medicinal stories for healing eating disorders. These books are wonderful reading. They draw on the wisdom of myths and folk tales for healing maladies of the soul and body.

Stories as medicine naturally relates strongly to the theme of this book. The therapeutic or healing wisdom of stories has been understood and used throughout human history. Thousands of years of human striving have produced a multiplicity of narratives that often live in many dimensions, with healing messages and meanings that reach from the everyday to the divine.

What is a therapeutic story?

All stories have therapeutic or healing potential. If a story makes people laugh, the laughter can be healing. If a story makes them cry, this can be healing too. Folk and fairy tales, through their universal themes and resolutions, have healing possibilities. They can offer hope and courage to face the trials of life and help the listener find ways to move forward.

David Suzuki, a world-renowned environmentalist, suggests that stories can help in ‘healing’ our earth by building a spiritual connection to ‘place’. If a simple nature story, for example, can help connect children to their local forest, they may be more conscious of protecting it and caring for it when they get older. Through stories a holistic relationship to the environment can be developed and strengthened.

The very experience of listening to a story, no matter what the content, can be ‘healing’. Storytelling used on a regular basis in school programmes can help develop and strengthen children’s concentration and activate their imaginations. These effects are a healing balm in our modern times when children often spend many hours in passive mode watching TV and DVDs.

But over and above the healing potential of all stories, specific stories can help or heal specific situations. These stories, for the purposes of this book, are described as ‘therapeutic’. In line with the definition of healing cited earlier – restoring to health; bringing into balance; becoming sound or whole – therapeutic stories can be described as ones that help restore lost equilibrium, or regain a sense of wholeness. When teachers, psychologists, parents, grandparents (and any other adults in a childcaring role) use a healing story with children, the story has the potential to bring the behaviour or situation back into balance.

What is behaviour?

The word ‘behaviour’ in relation to children simply means ‘the way a child acts’. This can be either positive (co-operative, helpful, sharing, pleasant, reliable, honest, etc.) or negative (aggressive, dishonest, lazy, disrespectful, greedy, irritating, etc.).

Influences on children’s behaviour

A child’s behaviour may be influenced by many factors:

•	Age and stage of development – physical, cognitive, social, emotional
•	Individuality (temperament, personality, etc.)
•	Cultural background
•	Meeting of basic needs (is the child behaving inappropriately because he is hungry, cold, tired, etc.?)
•	State of health/well-being
•	Family environment
•	Daycare, pre-school or school environment
•	Presence, or lack of, routines and consistency – in both home and school environments
•	Other adults, older children, peers, siblings
•	How the child has learnt behaviour in the past – e.g. if screaming loudly, or sulking, always gets the child what he wants, then this can become an entrenched, ‘learned’ behaviour

All children will display inappropriate or undesirable behaviour at some time. In fact some forms of behaviour considered to be a problem are simply an age-appropriate response to particular stimuli or situations. It is normal for a two-year-old to throw tantrums when limits are enforced. It is normal for a three-year-old sometimes to pocket a toy from daycare to take home – this is not stealing, but an innocent ‘borrowing’, and may mark the need to create a transition between the child’s two realities. It is normal behaviour for a six- or seven-year-old to become a little sneaky, secretive, even dishonest. This doesn’t mean that the caregiver has to accept such responses, but it is important that all adults who work with young children have a background understanding of developmental stages and ‘norms’. This can be accessed in parenting and educational books on child development and child psychology.i

Context and relationships

Most influences on children’s behaviour fall into two main categories – context and relationships. Each child exists and develops within an intricate web of environments and networks – family, school, community and global. A child’s particular behaviour can rarely be effectively addressed in isolation.

Firstly the context of how, when, where and why certain behaviour occurs are important factors that need to be taken into account. If a child is hungry and/or tired, demanding behaviour is usually predictable and justified. If a child has chronic muscle pains in his legs, and his parents/teachers have not identified this (and the child is not old enough to articulate that he is in pain), then this child may hit out at anyone who comes too close. Consequently he could be incorrectly diagnosed as a child with aggressive tendencies!

I once heard about a four-year-old boy who was behaving in silly and inappropriate ways during ‘outside’ time at pre-school, particularly when his friends were having fun with mud or water play. On consulting the parents, it was found that this boy had been traumatised six months previously by a mud-flood coming in the back door of the house. Even though the family had recently moved to a new house in the town, the child would not go near mud or water, and would get quite disturbed if he encountered either. The child’s father attended one of my therapeutic story workshops and made up a story about a family who lived in a ‘bamboo cottage’ that always seemed to get full of muddy water when it rained (the story was quite light and humorous). Finally the family packed up and moved to another town and lived in a house with strong walls, many drains and a high fence and were now protected from water coming into their home. Both parents told this story to their son on many nights before bedtime. The boy loved the story and asked for it over and over again. Weeks later it was reported that he was happily playing outside at pre-school and seemed to be delighting in his new discovery of mud, sand and water.

Another example of the influence of ‘context’ on behaviour was of a boy in my kindergarten who witnessed a fire burn down half his house. I described this in Chapter 3.

Secondly, the child’s relationship to others in the group and/ or the family can have an influence on behaviour. Has the child recently joined the class or the family recently moved to a new area? There is often a behaviour pattern that children can bring to new relationships – a more extrovert child may enter a new peer-group and find her place through ‘show-off’ behaviour, whereas a shyer child may behave in a needy/clinging way. This requires understanding from the teacher/parents and some nurturing attention to help the child find her way in the first few weeks or months. Some time is important here for allowing the behaviour to ‘settle down’ or return to ‘normal’. This doesn’t mean teachers/parents ignore possible challenging behaviour. They need to be continually observant and alert to the social dynamics in children’s groups. They especially need to be aware of any signs of bullying. An example of how a teacher dealt with bullying with an eight-year-old girl who recently joined the class can be found in ‘Red Truck Story’ (see page 191). Kim Payne’s work on social inclusion and bullying is recommended reading (see website in reference section).

Another example of the effect of relationships on behaviour is when the child is one of the youngest in the family. Early childhood teachers often observe that the younger children in a family bring to school the behaviour they have experienced from their older siblings – teasing, bullying, bad language, etc. Although stories can have the potential to help here, they may need to be supplemented by a home visit and some strategies for the whole family.

Thirdly, the adult’s relationship to the child, and to the situation, can impact on what may be termed ‘challenging behaviour’. The ‘Baby Bear Koala’ story (see page 249) was written for a kindergarten mother who was distressed that her four-year-old child was behaving ‘badly’ as he didn’t want to part from her each day. When the story helped clarify that it was actually the mother who didn’t want to part from her child, she realised that the accusation of her child behaving ‘badly’ was incorrect. The reality of this situation was that the mother had not faced her own fears from being left as a child. She was also feeling guilty for working full-time when the boy was younger and constantly leaving him with a babysitter. The healing story helped bring clarity to her thoughts and a more healthy balance to her relationship with her son. She kept him at home for another year and then he happily started school at age five. Sometimes it is the parent or teacher’s behaviour that needs to be addressed!

Other adult/family influences can come from recently separated or remarried parents, resulting in split families and/or newly added stepchildren. In one situation a home visit revealed that the three children (one of them a step-child) were constantly fighting and screaming to get the mother’s attention. The mother was in an extremely depressed state over, in her words, her ‘lack of worth as a human being’. The children’s difficult behaviour had a direct connection with their depressed and stressed mother. I wrote a story for the mother to help her rediscover her inner beauty (see ‘The Beautiful Queen’, page 165). Not only did the story help the mother feel better about herself, but after reading it many times she decided to share it with her children aged 13, 9 and 5 years. They wanted to hear it again and again. The story was only one strategy on a long path of family therapy, but it helped the family start a bedtime story ritual. The mother reported that at last there was one time in the day when the family felt back in ‘balance’.

Evaluating adult influence on children’s behaviour

It is important to continually evaluate your approach to care-giving to make sure that you are not contributing to the difficult behaviour – e.g. do your expectations match the child’s age and stage of development? Does the school programme meet the child’s needs? Are your daily activities organised and prepared? It is also important to check if you are working with strategies that help promote positive behaviour.

The following list may help you (and other parents / teachers / carers in the child’s environment) with this evaluation:

•	Do you model positive behaviour?
•	Do you model positive and respectful language?
•	Do you model and teach social skills?
•	Do you set clear, fair and consistent limits?
•	Do you notice and encourage desirable behaviour?
•	Do you re-direct and distract children’s negative behaviours where possible (a ‘nip in the bud’ approach)?
•	Do you ignore (or ‘feed’) attention–seeking behaviour?
•	Do you give ‘mixed-messages’ in dealing with inappropriate behaviour – i.e. say one thing but do another? For example, saying to a child: ‘If you continue whingeing, we won’t go to the park’ while putting the child’s walking shoes on in readiness for going there.
•	Do you have quality ‘time’ for / with each child in your care?
•	Is your child’s day over-scheduled, not allowing for enough free play (down-time)?

Identifying ‘challenging’ behaviour

Even with the above strategies in place, a child may display behaviour that requires a more considered and individual approach. Termed a ‘difficult’ or ‘problem’ or ‘challenging’ behaviour, it is often more than a short-term annoyance or disturbance. In our care-giving role we usually ‘know’ if a child is exhibiting challenging behaviour because dealing with it can take up a large amount of the carer’s time and emotional energy!

On a more formal level, child psychologists offer extensive descriptions of ‘challenging’ or difficult behaviour. For the purposes of this book, these have been condensed into the following points.

Challenging or difficult behaviour may be:

•	Behaviour that disrupts, harms, or infringes unfairly on the rights of others
•	Behaviour that harms the environment or other living things
•	Behaviour that presents a clear risk of harm to the child
•	Typical behaviour that occurs too often or beyond the age where we would expect a child to learn more appropriate options
•	Behaviour that interferes with the child’s ability to learn and process information, or prevents the child from using already learned skills
•	Behaviour that interferes with the child’s ability to interact
•	Appropriate behaviour at the wrong time or place (e.g. throwing balls inside the house; loud singing or laughing in the school library)
•	Behaviour that is consistently a problem and seen as such by more than one person

Challenging behaviour can be further classified as a ‘disorder’ (e.g. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, commonly known as ‘ADHD’) if a pattern of problems display relative severity, exist in multiple settings, continue over an extended period of time, and interfere with ‘normal development’. Children with suspected behaviour disorders should be referred to a team of specialists for diagnosis. To gain a thorough picture, the child’s teacher and all relevant care-givers should, where possible, be included in the discussion and diagnostic process.

Describing specific challenging behaviour

Behavioural descriptions need to be clear and precise. General labels like ‘timid’, ‘fearful’, ‘destructive’ or ‘uncooperative’ make it difficult to understand what it is that needs changing and what the desirable change could be. Most importantly, when we come to story-making, specific descriptions help in choosing metaphors to suit specific behaviours. It can be a helpful exercise to list the following:

•	Who is doing the behaviour (and, if applicable, who else is involved)?
•	What is the behaviour?
•	When does the behaviour occur?
•	Where does it occur?
•	How does the behaviour manifest?

The following tables (see pages 52-55) have been compiled with examples of challenging and desirable behaviour – both at home and at daycare/school.

Labels and categories

When contemplating a story to address challenging behaviour, it should not be a question of ‘bad’ behaviour made ‘good’ through a story, or ‘naughty’ children made into ‘good’ children. It is about trying to bring the behaviour or situation back into wholeness or balance. My strong advice to you in playing midwife to this process is to beware of labelling! It is unhealthy practice for children to be labelled, and yet it can happen so easily, and so often with negative results. I have known a child who was mistakenly labelled as ‘dishonest’ by the teachers in a school and over time he ‘grew’ into this label. When interviewed by the school counsellor several years later he revealed the following thoughts: ‘If I am going to be accused for every theft that happens in the classroom, then I might as well get the benefits of spending the money’.

For an easy reference to stories for commonly identified behaviours, I have found it necessary in this book to use general categories like ‘greedy’, ‘lazy’, ‘shy’, ‘restless’ in the story sections. These categories could mistakenly be used to describe or label a child. This is not my intention. The categories could also be read as putting the behaviour problem ‘inside’ the child, rather than as part of a whole context and relationship. Again, this is not my intention. A description of a particular behaviour should relate to the behaviour only, and should never be confused with the child herself.

We also need to keep in mind that our judgement of whether behaviour is ‘good’ or ‘bad, ‘appropriate’ or ‘inappropriate’ can be very subjective. It is influenced by our own beliefs, attitudes, cultural background, past experiences (including our own upbringing), combined with our individual relationship with and understanding of the child and the situation. Sharing our experiences with other parents / teachers / counsellors can help give more objectivity.

Imbalance to balance

An intention to transform or ‘heal’ challenging behaviour should be seen on a continuum of bringing things back into balance (for example, ‘uncaring’ to ‘more caring’; untidy to tidier; restless to settled; dishonest to honest), not changing a ‘bad’ child into a ‘good’ child.

If a four-year-old child is exhibiting demanding and whingeing behaviour – and the family has just moved house or a new baby has arrived – a story to help the demanding child adjust to the new situation could help restore balance in family life (see ‘Anything New’, page 210).

If five-year-old children are in the habit of throwing their toys around the classroom, an imaginative story line that brings the toys to life can restore respectful and caring balance. The story could build the picture of a doll enjoying being rocked and fed (not thrown), of a little pot and spoon loving to help cook dinner for the doll (not thrown), a car enjoying taking the doll for a ride (not thrown)… But what about the outside toys? A ball that loves to be taken out and thrown up in the air to reach as high as the sky. At the end of play the ball is brought back inside and tucked back into its box to rest next to the doll and other toys. A little rhyme for each toy could be helpful for the adult to use during playtime:

I’m a little doll (car, etc) and it’s very well known,
I love to be rocked (pushed along, etc) but never thrown!

Describing ‘challenging’ behaviour

WHO	WHAT	WHEN	WHERE	HOW
1) Girl – 5 yrs	Fearful of being alone in any room of the house	Day and night	At home	Clings to mother or father – wants someone to be with her whenever she goes to different rooms – e.g. to the toilet / her bedroom
2) Boy – 8 yrs	Irresponsible use of knives	When left alone	At home	Uses sharp knife to cut into furniture, trees, pillows, etc
3) Boy – 41/2 yrs	Continual whingeing (whining) to teacher	Inside and outside playtime	At school	Stays close to teacher, complains about having no friends, whinges (whines) about daycare being boring
4) Whole class – 6 yrs	Lack of co-operation at clean-up time	After morning tea and lunch	At school	Children try to run around or hide instead of helping sweep floor, wipe tables, etc

Describing ‘challenging’ behaviour

WHO	WHAT	WHEN	WHERE	HOW
1) Girl – 5 yrs	Confident to explore new spaces and be on her own	Day time	At home	Child gains confidence in venturing into and being able to stay by herself in new sections of the house, in daylight hours (child too young to be expected to be confident in the dark)
2) Boy – 8 yrs	Responsible and constructive use of knives and other sharp tools	When left alone	At home	Uses knife and chisels for carving wooden shapes Uses knife in cooking – to chop vegetables, fruit, etc
3) Boy – 41/2 yrs	Stops complaining – gets involved in play	Inside and outside playtime	At school	Stops clinging to teacher – gets involved with other children and begins to participate in and enjoy the daily program
4) Whole class – 6 yrs	Co-operation at tidy-up time	After mealtimes	At school	Children enjoy sweeping and cleaning; children co-operate and act sensibly at cleaning up time

Using the medium of story to transform ‘challenging’ to ‘desirable’ behaviour

(Note: the framework for writing such stories is explored in the following chapter)

WHO	WHAT	STORY	OUTCOME
1) Girl – 5 yrs	Fearful of being alone in any room of the house	Story about a ‘star girl’ who comes down from the sky and into a child’s bedroom at night through the window. ‘Star Girl’ becomes the child’s special friend	Mother made a ‘star doll’ as a prop for the story and a star necklace to hang on a hook in the kitchen – her daughter started to wear this. With it hanging around her neck she started to go to the toilet on her own and also to venture into other parts of the house.
2) Boy – 8 yrs	Irresponsible use of knives	Story describes many destructive uses of a pocket knife and its repetitive consequences. This is followed by a dream and the carvingof a wooden castle (See ‘The Pocket Knife and the Castle’ page 119)	Boy experiences the joy of creating something beautiful by carving wood. Boy is motivated to use his pocket knife to construct rather than destroy or damage things.
3) Boy – 41/2 yrs	Continual whingeing (whining)	Story about a young whale so busy whingeing he loses his way and gets caught in a shallow lagoon; he is finally rescued by his use of whale song. (See ‘Whingeing Whale’, page 100)	Teacher uses rhyme and song from story to deal with clinging behaviour in a light way. Child’s whingeing replaced by more constructive uses of voice – he starts to copy the rhyme and song. Child slowly detaches from teacher and gets involved in play activities.
4) Whole class – 6 yrs	Lack of co- operation at tidy-up time	Story about three little men who take turns using the broom – one couldn’t be bothered, one is too fast and wild, one is careful and committed to the task. (See ‘Little Straw Broom’, page 220)	Teacher presents puppet show of story. Children act out story with different coloured hats and take this activity into their play and into tidy-up time – ‘gold hat’ behaviour becomes enjoyable and is encouraged by the teacher and peer-group.

If six-year-olds are continually dropping their lunch scraps and papers into the garden, this littering behaviour could be brought back into balance by the teacher telling and dramatising the ‘Grandmother and the Donkey’ story (see page 123). The metaphor of caring for ‘nature’s child’, with ways of helping nature’s child to be beautiful rather than ugly, can make a deep impact on children. This can help transform their behaviour through their own motivation to make a difference.

If an eight-year-old is found continually stealing, a story that moves, in great detail, through the stealing behaviour and its consequences, can help give the child a more balanced and engaged understanding (see ‘Dishonest Dingo’, page 110).

The tapestry of discipline

The main aim of this book is to help you to use healing stories to meet challenging behaviour in a subtle but effective way. In this chapter, various strategies have been described to help you understand and identify different kinds of behaviour. In the next chapter I offer a framework to help you find metaphors and construct stories to address a wide range of behaviours and situations.

As stated earlier, storytelling is just one of many possible approaches and strategies in addressing challenging behaviour, and cannot fix all problems. To thoroughly address the bigger picture requires a study of the complex ‘tapestry’ of discipline. Stories have the potential to be light-filled threads in this tapestry. But if the foundation threads in the weaving are not strong, the fabric can fall apart. Working with healing stories without any ‘foundation’ could leave story threads hanging in mid-air and very little to show for the creative effort.

This weaving metaphor can be helpful in finding a comprehensive approach to behaviour management with young children. It can provide many useful strategies for challenging behaviours. The strong warp threads include rhythm, routine and consistency, acceptance, respect, setting realistic limits, preparation and organisation, and many other ways and means to help promote positive behaviour (see previous list). The creative weft threads are also numerous. As well as the imaginative thread of storytelling, the discipline tapestry can be coloured and enriched through humour, games, songs, rhymes, family rituals, festivals and community events.

The complex tapestry of discipline requires a separate book (my next project?) devoted to exploring its rich and varied threads. This book however, must confine itself to the single, illumined strand of healing stories.

ⁱ	For instance: Rahima Baldwin Dancy, You Are Your Child’s First Teacher (see reference section)

5

A Construction Model
for Story Writing

As will be clear by now, my construction model for writing a therapeutic (healing) story works with a three-part framework of ‘Metaphor’, ‘Journey’ and ‘Resolution’. To help you as a writer, I now want to identify and discuss these separately, even though you will find they merge intricately to create the finished story.

The framework put forward here is only one possible approach. Please do not see it as the only way to write stories. Use it as a starting point for story making. It may also help you with analysing existing stories, which in the long run can help with the creation of new ones.

First you need to be clear about what you are trying to achieve. In writing a healing story it helps to carefully select therapeutic metaphors and to construct a journey or quest to meet the need of the situation and the age of the children. The story should not try to moralise or induce guilt – this cannot be stressed enough! The objective is simply to reflect what is happening and, through the story ‘metaphors’ and ‘journey’, provide an acceptable means of dealing with the behaviour and/or a realistic resolution. A healing tale should, as much as possible, leave the listener free to come to her own conclusion – in this way the ‘power of story’ is left to do its work, as Ben Okri suggests, ‘in silence, invisibly’.

Metaphor

The use of metaphor i is a vital ingredient in therapeutic story making. Metaphors help build the imaginative connection for the listener. An integral part of the story journey, they often play both the negative roles (the obstacles, tempters and temptations that pull the behaviour or situation out of balance) and the positive roles (the helpers or guides that lead the behaviour/situation back to wholeness or equilibrium). The table of ‘Metaphors in story making’ below gives some examples of these, but first it may help to look at one example.

Try to picture the following: a story is written for a child who is pinching other children, but the story contains no imaginative metaphor – in other words it is directly about a child who always pinches other children, learning to stop when the other children refuse to be her friend. If such a story is told in class, because it lacks metaphors to help ‘lift’ the listeners into their imaginations, the group will quite possibly try to work out who the story is about, and suddenly the teacher might be interrupted by someone calling out, ‘Rebecca does the same, she pinches everyone!’

Let us now take the same example and build a story with metaphor. Starting first with ‘simile’ can be a helpful inroad to story making. ‘A pinching child is like a nipping crab’. Then drop the ‘as if’ and ‘is like’ and our story can begin.

There was once a little crab who was not very popular. His friends were tired of him always being in a cranky mood and using his claws to nip and hurt them …

Now, into the story come some of the ‘obstacle’ metaphors – Octopus, Starfish, and Seagull. They are the upset friends who plot some unpleasant punishments for Crab. Next, Turtle enters as the wise helper. One more ‘helping’ metaphor along the story journey is the seaweed mittens that keep Crab’s nippers warm and cosy. The resolution is Crab’s ‘self-progress’ towards keeping his nippers under control – eventually the mittens fall apart, the waves wash them out to sea, and Crab is able to play with his friends without hurting them.

This story about ‘Cranky Crab’ (see page 159) has been used successfully by a therapist and a teacher for pinching behaviour. After the story was first told in class a ‘pinched’ child asked the teacher to bring some gloves for the pincher. The pincher happily accepted wearing the gloves. The story had presented this idea in a positive light, and not as a punishment.

The table below (see pages 60-61) lists metaphors used in some of the therapeutic stories in this book. It is a guide only – the imaginative qualities of metaphor make them difficult to sort and categorise. You will notice that in one example, ‘The Brownies Story’, one of the ‘obstacles’ is also one of the ‘guides’ – the riddle is an obstacle, but once solved by the boy it becomes a guide towards his new task of becoming a helping Brownie. In the story of ‘Tembe’s Boots’ there are no obstacles, only a slight change when it comes to rest-time and the boots need to wait outside the room. In this story the journey is simply a repetition of the boots as ‘friends together’.

As an exercise in understanding the use of metaphor in story making, I suggest you read some other stories from the book, then fill in the empty lines in the table, identifying the obstacles and the helpers. (But you may also find a story that doesn’t have metaphors that fit either of these categories!)

Clues for choosing metaphors

When writing a story to address specific behaviour, clues for metaphors for the main character can sometimes come from finding a corresponding animal, bird, insect or object with a similar behaviour – e.g. pinching or nipping crab (a lamb or a dove would not work as a metaphor for pinching!); pesky pelican; restless pony; scratching cat; noisy gnome.

When writing a story for a specific child, metaphors can also be found by using the child’s favourite animal or toy, or taking clues from his surrounding environment. Does the child have a passion for dogs, for horses, or for the sea and sailing boats? Does he live by a river, in a forest or in a high-rise block in a city? If in the country or city, what sights and/or daily experiences does the child have on his way to school, in the local forest or on the beach?

Metaphors in story making

Story	Obstacles, tempters, temptations	Helpers, guides
Born to be King (page 230)	The castle walls; the broken bones; the dark room	The wise woman; the mirror; the sunlight; the prince’s golden crown; ‘born to be king’
Grandmother and the Donkey (page 123)	Move from country to town; people’s loss of connection to nature; litter in streets	Grandmother; Nature’s Child; donkey; children
Pesky Pelican (page 143)	Always wanting more; food easily available	Advice from the pelican parents; the kind fisherman; remembering what ‘pelicans’ should really do!
Greedy Possum (page 131)	Bower bird, sparkling ‘human’ treasures, hollow log to withdraw into; pouch to hold ‘things’	Nature’s beauty, mother, dewdrop, pouch to hold baby possum
Dishonest Dingo (page 110)	Smallest dingo in litter; red dust; hunger; cave of bones	Cleansing rain; dingo’s own conscience
Garden of Light (page 127)	King-didn’t-care; treasure mines and treasure castles; high stone wall; grey tarnished ball	Nature Weaver; nature cloth; shining golden ball; children
Whingeing Whale (page 100)	Losing connection with group, reef, shallow water, tide going out	Memory of whale song, whale pod, large wave
The Brownies (page 13)	Cranky father; journey through dark forest; owl and riddle	Grandmother; owl and riddle; boy’s realisation of his helping task
Tembe’s Boots (page 118)		Little red boots; repetition of ‘friends together’

When writing a story for a whole group or class of children, then clues for metaphors may be found from a theme in the curriculum or from the local school environment. There might be a mixture of noisy birds and soft singing birds in the school garden, and a very noisy child in the classroom. This could lead to a story with the theme of listening to others. Perhaps there is inappropriate spitting behaviour in the group. The teacher could connect this with the recent purchase of a new garden hose for the school. In the story, which can be delightfully humorous, the hose could start squirting everything – even a neighbour standing on the other side of the fence, or the secretary working in the office. Finally the hose has to be turned off at the tap and packed away until it realises that there are some things that shouldn’t be squirted!

When looking for clues for metaphors, there are no hard and fast rules – stories don’t fit comfortably with ‘rules’! Sometimes humour can work very well – for example, for a story about stealing, the metaphor of ‘sticky fingers’ (and a character of the same name) could lead to all kinds of bizarre adventures, where everything touched by the thief gets stuck to him. Sometimes a story may catch the interest of a child because the metaphors are so ‘foreign’. Choosing a story for thumb-sucking about a monkey who is always sucking its fingers and toes (and therefore misses out on eating the ripest and sweetest fruits) could work very well for a child who lives in a cold northern country and has never even seen a monkey.

You need to exercise lateral thinking in your choice of metaphors. A colleague once wrote a story for a child whose mother had gone away without any warning and nobody knew when she would return. Even if this child had had a favourite animal, to choose a mother animal for this story would have been difficult. Mothers in the animal kingdom rarely leave their children alone. Instead, this colleague chose to use the moon (mother) and the stars (children) as her metaphors. In her story, called ‘Mother Moon’ (see page 248), she put the emphasis on the star children in the night sky having to polish their star clothes so they could shine brightly until mother moon returned. Apparently this story helped the relatives as well as the child – they all had to find ways to be stronger until mother returned. The story resolution was careful not to promise any return. Fortunately, however, the mother came back five months later.

Metaphors or story seeds

Metaphors are not just used within stories. They have a power when used on their own that is sometimes so obvious it can be overlooked. Metaphors or ‘story seeds’ can be wonderful tools for helping behaviour change (examples of the ‘magic sash’ and the ‘waterfall’ have already been described in the first chapter).

When my eldest son was five years old he was due for his first dentist appointment. I was quite nervous, as the visit to the dental surgery brought up tense memories from my own childhood. For Kieren however, it was very exciting. He climbed up into the great chair, opened his mouth wide with anticipation and was examined. The dentist, an old Indian man, then told Kieren that one of his teeth was in need of a silver star to make it strong. He explained that it would hurt a little as he put the star inside, but the star would live there for a long time and take care of his weak tooth. ‘Would this be ok?’ he asked. Kieren nodded an enthusiastic YES, and the procedure began.

This was an interesting lesson for me in the power of metaphor – in this case, a ‘silver star’ – in making a positive difference to Kieren’s acceptance of having a filling put into his tooth. Kieren quite happily returned to the dentist a year later – there was no difficult behaviour to deal with to get him there. My only difficulty with the whole experience was that my second son was upset that he didn’t get a star as well! I had to convince him that it was best to have your own teeth naturally strong and the stars were only used to strengthen them.

It is through the use of metaphor or ‘story seeds’ that poets, writers and politicians can often deliver such potent messages. Metaphors are also part of our everyday life, for instance when we describe character traits (‘quiet as a lamb’, ‘slippery as an eel’) and in emphasising various predicaments (‘opening a can of worms’, ‘taking the bull by the horns’, ‘setting the cat amongst the pigeons’). At the weekly teachers’ meeting a colleague might say something like: ‘We should leave no stone unturned until this problem is solved’. This kind of language, with a pictorial element, often makes greater impact. Metaphor is ubiquitous in language, though it can easily also become cliché through over-use, thus losing its original, striking power. Poets and creative storytellers also revive and refresh language itself, giving it a new charge and lease of life.

I encourage you to work more consciously with metaphor with your children. Choose a child’s behaviour that you are finding difficult at the moment. A simple example: tidying up the toys. How could a visual image or metaphor make a difference to the situation? Firstly think of something that is a tidy and methodical character: An animal? An insect? A little elf? When you have made your choice, try to create a little rhyme for your child to use at tidy-up time – e.g. As tidy as a little elf, putting things back on the shelf … This could then be extended into a short story, with one or more ‘obstacle’ metaphors to cause untidiness then a ‘helping’ metaphor (the one from your rhyme) to bring ‘tidiness’ back into the room or house.

Journey

The journey is the structural part of the therapeutic story construction. An eventful journey is a way to build the ‘tension’ as the story evolves, and can lead the plot into and through the behaviour ‘imbalance’ and out again to a wholesome resolution. The use of ‘obstacle’ and ‘helping’ metaphors are intricately connected with the journey. The tension or conflict in the journey is usually built up through the involvement of the ‘obstacle’ metaphors, and the resolution is achieved through the ‘helping’ metaphors.

For a 3-4 year-old, the ‘journey’ can be as simple as using repetition of the same experience, or the repetition of a song or rhyme throughout the story. In ‘The Snail and the Pumpkin’ (see page 201), the snail’s song is repeated many times as she travels up and over the pumpkin mountain: ‘Slowly, slowly, oh so slow, this is how a snail must go’. In ‘The Little Straw Broom’ (see page 220), written to enthuse willing helpers, the repetition of the ‘crumbs’ poem builds the journey tension. After the children have heard this three times, they are thirsting for a positive solution, for the crumbs to be swept up.

Another way of building tension is by using repetition combined with a sequence of additional characters (often referred to as ‘cumulative’ stories). The repetition becomes the key structural device in the story by developing the action through a single extending image. The well known tale of the ‘The Enormous Turnip’ is an excellent example here – a little boy tries to pull up the turnip, then calls mother, who calls grandfather, who calls rabbit; rabbit calls mouse; and finally mouse calls caterpillar. There are countless versions of this story from cultures around the world. Without the build-up of characters, the story would simply be a recounting of a quite insignificant incident – ‘A boy went into the garden and pulled up his turnip’.

In a story for an older child, the story ‘journey’ usually needs to be more involved, with a quest of some kind and several turnings or tasks along the road. In the ‘Brownies Story’ (see Chapter 2), the twists and turns of the journey lead the listener deep into the story theme. If Grandma had simply told the boy that he is meant to be the helping brownie, it is unlikely that the child would have listened. Instead the story journey takes the boy into the forest to visit the owl, then back to the lake in the moonlight to solve a riddle.

Examples of more complex plots can be found in many of the well-known fairytales such as ‘Cinderella’ or ‘Snow White’. Some examples in this book include ‘The Invisible Hunter’ and ‘Garden of Light’.

To really get a feel of the themes, tension and journey in more complex stories, my advice is to read many children’s stories. Try to borrow or buy collections of folktales from many different cultures. There are also internet sites where you can find a wonderful variety of stories (see Bibliography and references).

Resolution

The resolution in a therapeutic story is the restoration of harmony or balance in a situation or behaviour that has been disruptive or out of balance. It is important that the resolution is positive and forward-looking, and not guilt-inducing. For example, in the ‘Cranky Crab’ story, the pinching behaviour is out of balance and unacceptable to the crab’s friends. Through the help of the turtle, the seaweed mittens, and Crab’s own efforts, the behaviour is restored to balance. The little crab is not made to feel guilty about his behaviour. Instead the story journey leads naturally to a self-determined resolution. In the ‘Bored Baboon’ story, (see page 98), the family’s efforts to encourage the child to go out and play amount to nothing. Yet the young baboon’s lack of interest in playing is clearly out of balance – can you imagine a little baboon just wanting to sit and do nothing? Through the journey of being trapped in the hunter’s cage, the out-of-balance experience is taken to the extreme and then resolved by the baboon being rescued and set free to run and jump and play. What a relief for him and the listener!

Even though the resolution comes at the end of the story, it is usually helpful when planning to think about this before anything else. If the resolution is not clear, then it is difficult to know what to work towards with your metaphors and journey.

Different behaviours and situations seem to require different approaches. Some are quite straightforward – for example, in a story for a child who is continually whingeing or whining, the obvious resolution is to have the whingeing replaced by more constructive uses of a voice. In the story of ‘Whingeing Whale’ (see page 100), the baby whale ends up learning to use his voice to make a beautiful whale song.

A more complex approach is presented in the story of ‘Dishonest Dingo’ (see page 110). The story leads the listener through sequences of stealing, goes deep into the ‘cave of bones’, and ends with the cleansing rain unveiling the dishonest mask. The resolution here is that dishonest behaviour changes to honest behaviour through the conscience of the main character, not through any kind of externally imposed punishment.

A less obvious resolution occurs in a story for a child with separated parents. This needs some careful thought – the story should not offer more than what may happen in real life – i.e. don’t suggest that the parents might get back together! To help plan the resolution, you may need to make some enquiries. Do the parents communicate and share time with the child? Has one parent disappeared altogether from the family scene? There could also be a chance in such a story for the parents to hear a message and change their behaviour – learning about consistency, for example, and keeping their focus on the child’s needs. Perhaps the story could be about two trees growing in different gardens, spreading their shade over a child who plays in both places. The child could move from one garden to the other through a special gate that opens with rhythmical timing. Perhaps the gate opens and closes with a special song? A parent could use this song while driving the child to spend time with the other parent, thus helping to minimise the anxiety that often comes at such times. The story could also include a metaphor of strong sunlight filtering through the trees and giving light to each garden at different times. Perhaps the trees can even have a few branches that reach across the fence and weave amongst each other. Or if this is too ‘close’, the trees could be in opposite corners of each garden, with the special gate the only link between the two. Working out these different resolutions can be a healing balm for the parents and the therapist/teacher, as well as for the child.

For a child who is terminally ill, it would be inappropriate to make up stories where the sick get better and live happily ever after. The story maker has a serious responsibility to try to capture the bigger picture, with the resolution taking the listener to a place higher, or different, than the earthly one. Parents writing for their own children would most likely work from their own religious and/or philosophical beliefs. Teachers or therapists writing a story need to take the family’s beliefs into account. See the stories ‘Silky Wriggly’ (page 232), ‘Stream, Desert, Wind’ (page 235) and ‘Shimmer Wing’ (page 240) for three different examples.

Analysing therapeutic stories

The following tables (see pages 68-73) should be helpful for analysing existing stories, following the model of metaphor, journey, resolution. These analysis exercises may give some clarity to the model and help with new story constructions. Table One lists some examples of stories for general sorts of behaviour. Table Two lists some examples of stories written for specific situations. To get the most from these, I suggest you start with each table and go down the columns one story at a time. First read the story, then come back and fill in the empty columns.

At the back of the book, completed tables are included for Table One and Table Two. However, there are no right or wrong answers – this is only intended as a guide. You may find metaphors or resolutions in a particular story that other readers may not connect with, or perceive. Table Three is empty and is included for photocopying for your own use, or for group use, when brainstorming ideas for new stories.

Table One: ANALYSING THERAPEUTIC STORIES – General types of behaviour

STORY	METAPHOR(S)	JOURNEY	RESOLUTION
Tembe’s Boots (page 118)	• Little red boots • ‘Friends together’	• A description (with much repetition) of the daily adventures of a pair of boots	• Boots taken off feet and put carefully together at rest-time, not thrown in a messy pile
The Grandmother and the Donkey (page 123)
Little Straw Broom (page 220)
Restless Red Pony (page 199)
Whingeing (Whining) Whale (page 100)
Impatient Zebra (page 146)

Table Two: ANALYSING THERAPEUTIC STORIES – Specific Situations

STORY	METAPHOR(S)	JOURNEY	RESOLUTION
Baby Bear Koala (page 249)	• Tree (world) • Hungry growing baby • Tired mother • Juicy leaves • Higher branches	• Mother and baby in tree, mother falls asleep, hungry baby climbs by himself to reach juicy leaves	• Young koala becomes strong enough and brave enough to leave mother and venture into the world by himself
Cranky Crab (page 159)
The Pocket Knife and the Castle (page 119)
Born to be King (page 230)
Cloud Boy Story (page 22)
The Towel Story (page 192)

Table Three: CONSTRUCTING THERAPEUTIC STORIES

STORY	METAPHOR(S)	JOURNEY	RESOLUTION

Working out of a ‘helping’ intention

One of my storytelling students in Nairobi worked at the SOS Children’s Village. Towards the end of the training module, she asked me for a story to help with a newly arrived child called Sylvia. Sylvia had recently been orphaned at the age of five after her whole family was killed in a raid on her village.

My first reaction to this request was to say ‘No, sorry, I can’t possibly do this’. I then asked the student how she thought a story could make any difference to such a horrendous experience in a young child’s life. The student pleaded, ‘Perhaps a story could help, even if not heal?’

Once back in Australia I worked on a simple story with this aim – hoping to help the situation (see ‘A Doll for Sylvia’, page 239). Emailed back to Kenya, it was told to Sylvia by her teacher, who later reported on her improved play and interaction with others. The morning after hearing the story Sylvia woke up to find a doll in her bed, dressed in clothes embroidered with silver and gold threads. The doll became Sylvia’s special friend.

This was a humbling experience, one that led me to realise that some stories may simply help a little, even where no resolution is possible … and what a bonus if they can! It taught me that the story maker should always work out of this ‘helping’ intention, with the occasional blessing that a story may indeed ‘heal’. Even though this book is about ‘healing’ stories, I believe it is important to keep this ‘helping’ intention close to your heart, and be cautious of excessive expectations.

The value of props

The above example of ‘A Doll for Sylvia’ was given extra strength by the use of a ‘prop’. Occasionally a therapeutic story lends itself to this strategy. Adding props to a story does not mean one needs to buy something from a toyshop. There is magic and meaning in the use of a simple homemade item … a crown for a prince made from finger-knitted yellow wool; a stitched felt hat for a helping elf or brownie; a magic leather ring or painted wooden shield as ‘protection’ for a bullied child.

A therapist used a story strengthened by a prop to help a five-year-old child who was suffering from nightmares and afraid to go into any room in the house without a parent, even in the daytime. The story was about a ‘star girl’ who came into the child’s bedroom at night through the window and became a special friend. The mother made a ‘star doll’ as a prop for the story and the doll was hung inside her child’s bedroom window. At the therapist’s suggestion the mother also made a simple star necklace to hang on a hook in the kitchen – she encouraged her daughter to wear this and explore other parts of the house. With the star hanging around her neck the little girl could start going to the toilet on her own, and also into other parts of the house.

A mother from a Creative Discipline course had a successful ‘prop’ experience with her seven-year-old girl who had recently started to complain about going to school. The mother was travelling as part of her new job and her daughter had become unsettled because she was frequently away, even though the father was at home. The mother made up a story about a little wind fairy that could take messages over the mountains and through the forests, backwards and forwards between friends. Every time the mother returned home she would add adventures to this story. For a prop she sewed a simple little felt doll with white wings. Her daughter started to take it to school – it was small enough to fit inside her pocket – and she would whisper messages to it throughout the day. The prop gave her the security she needed to be at school when her mother was away.

Two parents were having a difficult time with their five-year-old boy not wanting to sleep in his bed in his own room. This family had a new baby, and getting a reasonable amount of sleep each night was a high priority for both parents. Having the five-year-old in their bed as well as the new baby was putting great stress on the relationship. The mother attended one of my ‘Craft and Story Circles’ held in the local park. She shared her ‘challenge’ with the group. In the next few days she wrote a story that was inspired by the miniature weaving she had started in the craft group. It was about a star that fell from the sky, and was found by a young boy in the garden. The boy wanted to help return the star to its home in the sky. He gathered coloured items from nature to weave a rainbow carpet, then he used this ‘magic’ carpet to fly the star back up to the sky. Afterwards the magic carpet lived with the boy under his pillow and took the boy to dream land every night to have new adventures.

Her son found a magic carpet under his pillow (in his own bed of course) the morning after his mother had told him the story. She had secretly woven it for him. Soon after this I visited the home, and the parents reported with great relief that their five-year-old now slept in his own room with the ‘magic carpet’ carefully placed on the table by his bed.

The tale of ‘Cranky Crab’ (see page 159) is another example of a story that lends itself to a prop. What better way to stop a child pinching than to wrap up the pinching fingers in warm gloves or mittens! Props can also be useful when telling stories to children. Examples of this are found in the book’s storytelling section.

Focusing on specifics

A common difficulty with story making is having a theme or behaviour that is too general. My advice to beginning writers is to focus on a specific example of the behaviour you want to address. This should help to generate ideas for your story journey.

For example, for a story to help with ‘aggressive’ behaviour, I suggest you list specific instances of such behaviour. Perhaps you have a child who tries to push children off their chairs at meal times – the story could be about ‘Mrs Chair’ whose purpose in life is to be ‘sat on’. The story journey could show how the chair deals with a kitten that is always pushing its brother kittens onto the floor. Perhaps the chair turns on its side or upside down until it is used properly. The chair could even have a chair rhyme or song about what a chair is meant to do. There is potential for some lovely humour here.

‘Silliness’, again, is too general: try to work with specific behaviour – for example trampling on flowers. Perhaps the flowers come alive and talk to the big dog that is always trampling on them. Perhaps the gardener makes a scarecrow that is befriended by the children and together they protect the garden …or the children could make a scarecrow. Children making a real scarecrow for the garden could strengthen the story.

Concentrating on specific examples should help inspire motifs for your story writing. Keep this tip in mind if you are floundering or going off at a tangent.

Adjusting stories to different situations

As a story maker, I think of myself as one of the weavers of the ‘worldwide-story-web’, keeping the special stories that I find, and write, alive through sharing them with others. Sometimes the sharing might need slight changes to fit a particular situation. This adds wealth to the sharing and builds the folklore of our times.

If you find a story in this book that fits your situation but needs changing somehow, do feel free to use poetic license. Remember, though, that a story is a whole entity and has its own integrity. Sometimes changing one part means you must revise and recreate the unity again.

Some of my stories have been adapted from classic tales – this is obvious in my story about ‘The Three Weaver Brothers’ (see page 149). Here I drew on ‘The Three Little Pigs’ but changed the wolf to the Kisuli-suli wind. This whirly-whirly wind can be just as devastating to the life of a bird in East Africa as the wolf was to the pigs in the classic tale.

A subtler adjustment happens every time I tell the well-loved story of ‘The Star Apple’ (see page 104). I always adapt the line about Grandma’s cooking, depending on the community and country I am in. In the American version I say ‘Sticky toffee popcorn balls’, in Australia maybe ‘Chocolate Lamingtons’; or in a health-conscious setting, I might say ‘Carob wheat-germ balls’. In Kenya, I would say ‘Mandazis’, as this is a well-loved treat known to all who live in East Africa.

If you have a problem with a child who is being destructive with scissors, you could, as an example, use the existing story of ‘The Pocket Knife and the Castle’ (see page 119). By making a few changes you might end up with a story about ‘The Scissors and the Castle’, in which the boy or girl in the story dreams about shaping a beautiful castle from a large piece of card. Or it could be ‘The Scissors and the Beautiful Shirt’. This could be used to motivate a sewing lesson with older children, and help create respect for craft-room equipment.

The story of ‘Impatient Zebra’ (see page 146), a little brown zebra who is not happy because his stripes haven’t yet changed to black, has proved to be very good for helping adults realise that child development takes time – ‘Good things come to those who wait!’ It is a story that could easily have other animals as the central character, for example a baby swan or a young male lion that, to begin with, look quite different from the adult. This of course was also the motif underlying Hans Andersen’s story ‘The Ugly Duckling’.

Repetition, rhythm and rhyme

Whether you are writing a story or using one from a storybook, the therapeutic importance of repeating the story several or many times for young children (and the use of repetition and rhyme within the stories in exactly the same way each time) should not be underestimated. It is a warm, enjoyable feeling for children to know what comes next. The rhythmic quality of repetition and rhyme provides enjoyment through familiarity and anticipation. Our children know this intuitively, and they ask for the same story, told in the same way, over and over again. This is not so different from adults who often love to hear their favourite piece of music or poetry repeated without a note or word changed.

The value of consistency and repetition as opposed to constant ‘stimulation and change’ is increasingly understood today as vital for young children’s healthy development. Rhythm and repetition, in everyday life as well as in storytelling, help children by:

•	affirming universal rhythms and continuity of life
•	giving confidence and security through knowing what comes next
•	developing memory and concentration skills
•	developing a sense of musicality (especially when there is rhyme with the repetition)
•	building language skills

As well as the benefits of repeating stories over and over again, the repetition and rhyme found within stories provide important food for children’s growing souls. I encourage you in your story making to build these ingredients into your stories. This is discussed in more detail in Chapter Six. You will find many examples in the story sections of how the repetition of events and little rhymes can help create the story tension and give a musicality and flow to the story.

Happy and hope-filled endings

Both ‘nursery’ and ‘kindergarten’, mean ‘garden for children’. Children can be compared to young plants in a nursery – the best way to help them grow strong is to offer as much protection as possible from the storms and winds of life.

Young children have a right to this protection – we feel this instinctively when we prevent children from watching the daily news with all its horrors of war and disasters. The wisdom of Nobel Prize Poet, Rabindranath Tagore, advises us to let children ‘play on the seashore’ as long as possible, untroubled by harsh realities:

On the seashore of endless worlds children meet. The infinite sky is motionless overhead and the restless water is boisterous. On the seashore of endless worlds the children meet with shouts and dances.

They build their houses with sand, and they play with empty shells. With withered leaves they weave their boats and smilingly float them on the vast deep. Children have their play on the seashore of worlds.

They know not how to swim, they know not how to cast nets. Pearl-fishers dive for pearls, merchants sail in their ships, while children gather pebbles and scatter them again.

Tempest roams in the pathless sky, ships are wrecked in the trackless water, death is abroad and children play. On the seashore of distant worlds is the great meeting of children.

This urge to protect can help us in choosing nourishing stories for young children. No matter how simple or complex the story journey, it is essential that the endings be happy and hope-filled. Good triumphing over evil is a very profound theme in folk and fairy tales, and children the world over need to hear this message.

As children reach school age (six or seven), ‘consequential’ stories with a just or fair ending can be introduced (see ‘The Magic Fish’, ‘The Fisherman’, and ‘A Bag of Nails’). In these stories, although there is not a ‘happy’ ending, the main characters are not killed or hurt in any way but learn a lesson from the consequences of their negative behaviour – e.g. greed, laziness, anger. Such stories help to prepare children for real-life consequences.

Only later should we introduce the genre of stories with both unhappy and often unjust or unfair endings. Older children, in late primary school or high school, who are studying the lives of famous people, are ready to cope with the harsh reality of how Joan of Arc’s life ended in being burned at the stake, or how early explorers suffered gruelling deaths through shipwrecks and starvation. Older children can cope with a sad or tragic ending. But in making your choices don’t forget that teenagers, and adults too, also need the satisfaction and nourishment of a ‘happy ending’ from time to time. More often than not!

ⁱ

Briefly, metaphor means seeing one thing as another, whereas simile involves a more conscious comparison of one thing with another, expressed in the word ‘like’. A metaphor for a slender tree might be: ‘The tree is a bending dancer’. The related simile, which involves somewhat more distance and detachment, would be: ‘The tree is like a bending dancer’.

6

Different Stories for Different Ages

An enthusiastic parent rushed home after a workshop on story making and created her first therapeutic story. It was a story for bed-wetting. It had wonderful metaphors and a very creative story journey. She returned one month later to a follow-up workshop, very disappointed that her story hadn’t had any effect on her child. When asked the age of her little boy, she replied, ‘Almost two’!

For many years teachers and parents have been asking me to make a list of appropriate stories for different age groups, occasions and situations. This is an impossible request and one I have resisted for a good reason – stories can’t be put in fixed categories. However, the above experience alerted me to the need for some kind of age-appropriate guide for story making and storytelling. This guide aims only to help you make your own decisions. Over the years, with the experience of actually writing for and telling to different age groups, one develops a ‘sense’ for such choices, but in the beginning the guidelines provided in this chapter may be helpful. To allow for overlapping of choices and ages, they are discussed in story genres and not in age groups.

Story rhymes and rhyming stories

Lullabies and nursery rhymes

The first ‘stories’ we naturally share with children are lullabies to sing a baby to sleep. Rhyming lullabies can tell a simple story –

‘Sleep my little child sleep, thy father guards the sheep, thy mother shakes the dreamland tree, down falls a little dream for thee, sleep my little child sleep’.

Gentle story songs like this are not just for babies, but can be used right up to school age and older, especially if children are unwell or having nightmares. There are many traditional versions of lullabies, and it is enriching to learn new ones from other cultures. Parents / carers can also make their own lullabies – the easiest way to do this is to use a familiar tune and make up new words, especially if you are not comfortable with the original wording. For example, you might not like the breaking bough in ‘Rock-a-bye baby’ so you could write your own end to the song –

Rock a bye baby, in the treetops, sun filters down through green leaves above, when the wind blows the cradle will rock, and baby will sleep to cooing of doves.

Even if you don’t believe you sing well, singing and chanting rhymes to your children is one of the best gifts a parent or carer can offer. With the young child so new to the world, and extremely sensitive to everything around, the real voice of the parent or carer is greatly preferable to a tape recorder. Simple body rhymes and story games come naturally into play – ‘Peekaboo, I see you’, ‘This Little Piggy went to market’, ‘Round and Round the Garden’. Touch and movement, soothing words, musicality, fun and laughter, all contribute to a healthy bonding between young children and their carers.

As babies develop into toddlers, the wealth of traditional nursery rhymes (e.g. ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’) and nursery rhyme-type stories (e.g. ‘Henny Penny’), with their wonderful rhythms, rhymes and repetition, give security and enjoyment. Children up to six years or even older can still enjoy and be nourished by their musicality and simplicity.

Story games, finger plays and body rhymes

From two–and-a-half to three onwards, with their growing awareness of their bodies and the everyday world around them, children are ready for more complex story-games (e.g. ‘Here we go round the Mulberry Bush’, ‘Row your boat’) and more detailed rhymes that tell ‘body’ stories (e.g. ‘Heads, shoulders, knees and toes’). Finger plays are also a well-loved activity. Many little stories can be told using fingers as simple props – about a little mouse, hiding in his little house; about ‘eency-weency spider’ climbing the water spout; about little ‘thumbkin’ hiding and then coming out to say hello.

One of the main group activities in pre-schools and kindergartens is ‘Ring Time’ or ‘Morning Ring’. This usually includes lots of different little story rhymes and story games, starting off very simply with toddlers (e.g. ‘Ring-a-ring-a-roses’) and progressing to the more involved actions of circle games with five- and six-year-olds (e.g. ‘Round and Round the Village’) and dramatising story themes through song and rhyme – e.g. harvesting food in the autumn; gathering firewood in winter; spring cleaning; summer at the beach.

Cumulative tales and nonsense stories

The three- to four-year-olds are able to absorb more complex rhyme and repetition in the form of cumulative tales. Characters in a cumulative tale keep arriving on the scene to join in with the same activity, e.g. ‘The Gingerbread Man’ and ‘The Enormous Turnip’. These stories have plenty of repetition because each time a new character joins the tale the same action is repeated – e.g. chasing the gingerbread man, helping to pull up the turnip. Rhyming lines from the story can become everyday chants for the child. For example, to get a pre-school class to move more quickly from outside time to hand-washing time, try using ‘Run, run, run as fast as you can, you can’t catch me I’m the gingerbread man!’

There is also an important place for humorous and ‘nonsense’ stories for this pre-school age group, rich in rhyme and language – e.g. ‘The Little Straw Broom’ (see page 220) and ‘Nibbler the Mouse’. ‘Nibbler the Mouse’ is a classic Russian nonsense tale about a little mouse who finds an upside-down pot and moves inside it to make it his house. Then along comes ‘Croaker-the-Frog’ –

Little House, Little House, who lives in this little house? I do, said Nibbler-the-Mouse, who are you? I’m Croaker-the-Frog, may I come and live with you?

Then, in progressive order, with lots of repetition, along comes ‘Hare-the-Hill-Jumper’, ‘Reynard-the-Fox-the-Fine-Talker’, ‘Prowler-the-Wolf-who-Lurks-Behind-Bushes’. Then finally, ‘Bear-Squash-the-Lot’ comes along, sits on the pot and squashes everyone. There are many variations on this theme, including ‘The Mouse and the Glove’. The animals could be substituted with others from your own environment. Nonsense stories are a genre for children that adults must be careful not to take too seriously. They speak to a child’s budding sense of humour, and even defy the golden ‘happy ending’ rule for stories for young children – the very nature of nonsense implies ‘no rules’.

Nature tales and ‘everyday’ stories

As concentration develops, from age three on, children can enjoy simple nature tales and ‘everyday’ stories – e.g. about a mother giraffe taking her baby for its first walk to the river; a tortoise that hides inside its shell whenever it meets any new animal on the path; a snail making a silver trail as it travels up and over a fence; a farmer baking a pumpkin pie; a boy going for a boat ride. Such little stories narrate simple, real and sequential events, and can often have integral rhyme and repetition. The snail may have a song she sings while slowly moving along; the farmer may chant as he bakes –

‘Pumpkin pie, riddle-dum-die, delicious nutritious pumpkin pie.’

Nature tales can grow in length and complexity as the child grows in age. An excellent tool for teachers to use in primary school when introducing new topics of study – whether butterflies or mountains or ‘the water cycle’ – a nature story can bring life to the lesson by capturing the children’s imagination from the first moment.

Another kind of ‘everyday’ story well-loved by pre-schoolers (and older) is an ‘I Remember When’ story. If you have never told a story to children, this is a great starting point. When working at my pre-school in Australia, I used to recount at the lunch table a favourite incident from a camping trip in Africa:

I remember when I was camping in Africa. While I was eating breakfast in front of my tent, a monkey appeared out of nowhere and took the banana off my plate. Before I could reach out to take it back the monkey had jumped into the tree above. I looked up and saw it sitting in the fork of a branch pealing the banana and grinning down at me.

I recently met a little girl at the local shopping centre who had attended my class several years before. She told me that when she grew up she was going to Africa so a monkey could eat one of her bananas just like in my story. I had not realised that this simple recounting of an experience was a ‘story’ until this child named it as one.

Personal ‘I Remember When’ stories from adults are a continual resource for growing children, right through their childhood and teen years and beyond. Of course these need some common-sense censoring for young children. Starting off with innocent and simple stories (e.g. I remember when I learnt to ride my first bicycle …) they may slowly progress to possibly X-rated stories from one’s own youth to share with teenage and adult children at the appropriate time. I am still ‘feeding’ off stories from my own grandparents – even though they are no longer alive. I was fortunate enough to inherit some of their diaries, and their stories of survival and resourcefulness are a rich part of my family ‘treasure chest’.

Folktales and fairytales, and the development of fantasy

As the young child grows physically and emotionally, her ability to imagine and fantasise develops. The stages of developing fantasy are best observed through changes in creative play. Whereas a younger child under two will imitate the working adult and fill a cart with blocks as mother/father fills the washing basket with clothes, the three- to four-year-old will play with and be stimulated by objects (e.g. blocks) and use them in different imaginative ways – the same block may be an iron, a car or a phone in turn, all during the same play session.

By four-and-a-half to five years, the child will usually have an imaginative idea first and then find the objects to play it out – e.g. restaurant play, hospital play, house-play, construction play (building farms, castles, boats, etc). By this stage the child’s imaginative forces are blossoming and ready to be nourished by traditional folk- and fairytales.

Fairytales in the broad sense of the term, i.e. folk stories from cultures throughout the world, speak a common language that is understood by and of value to children worldwide. By dealing with universal, archetypal behaviours and situations, folktales speak to the child’s budding individuality and encourage its development.

Folktales often have a ‘timeless’ quality. They satisfy the child’s profound craving for the miraculous and offer consolation and hope. Their depth of wisdom is a healing counterweight to our materialistic age and their ‘magic’ makes them valuable for all children. Unlike myths that tell of the unique and miraculous deeds of gods and supernatural beings (appropriate for eight years and over), folktales and fairytales tell of people – whether lowly or highborn, a simpleton, a princess or prince, or a child. With the ‘good’ often pictured as ‘beautiful’, and ‘evil’ as ‘ugly’, the stories are about archetypes, spiritual realities, which give forms of truth other than so-called ‘realistic’ ones. Thoughts are transformed immediately into action; spells and transformations are soul processes so a character can suddenly become ‘good’, ‘bewitched’ or ‘released’. Fairytales are like a mirror for children to see what they can become – with the witch, for example, as an image embodying all that can hamper development, and the princess or prince image embodying progressive development and the overcoming of obstacles.

In almost every tale there is either a problem that must be solved, such as the Three Billy Goats crossing the bridge, or a confrontation with evil that can take many forms, such as the wolf or hyena in ‘The Three Little Pigs’ or the queen in ‘Snow White’. ‘Tension’ and ‘relaxation’ are integral parts of the story journey, with the different moods and challenges offering the listener a training of the soul that healthy child development needs. Often modern storybooks lack this, concentrating instead on teaching counting and the alphabet; or giving rational explanations for everyday situations (e.g. ‘new baby in the house’, ‘first day at school’); or modifying a traditional fairytale to ‘sweeten’ or neutralise the ending. Children fed only on such stories may miss the opportunity for the full soul engagement developed in the overcoming of hindrances. However it is important to be aware of the right kinds of fairytales for different ages, and for this we need to investigate the following categories.

Categories of complexity

Folktales can be divided into ‘categories of complexity’. In general, the gentler the theme or journey, the more appropriate the tale is for younger children, and the greater or more complex the difficulties or journey, the more appropriate it is for older children.

In seeking folktales for three- to four-year-olds, I recommend a fourfold test for their ‘quality of fitness’:

•	Is the story full of action, in close natural sequence (more verbs than adjectives, more action than description)?
•	Are the images familiar to your children (not essential, but often preferred)?
•	Is the story not too long?
•	Does the story include rhyme and repetition (not essential, but preferred)?

Examples of such stories include ‘The Enormous Turnip’ (Russian); ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ (English); ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff’ (Norwegian – see page 181).

The next category, suitable for the four-and-a-half to six-year-olds, includes many of the tales that we normally associate with the term ‘fairytale’. These stories can still be tested as above, but contain more challenges and more detail, with an overall cheerful mood without too much sorrow or struggle. Although obstacles are encountered they do not weigh too heavily on the soul of the listener.

Examples include ‘The Elves and the Shoemaker’ (see page 226); ‘Rhodopese’ (Egyptian – see page 185); ‘Tiddalick’ (Indigenous Australian); ‘The Antelope, the Butterfly and the Chameleon’ (Kikuyu – see page 224); ‘The Fisherman’ (East African – see page 151).

Six- to seven-year-olds enjoy and benefit from stories of increasing length, challenge and detail, with characters that have a personal experience of suffering or sorrow. The confrontation with evil may be stronger and more challenging, and there may be more twists and turns along the journey.

Examples include: ‘Snow White’ and ‘The Seven Ravens’ (Grimm); ‘Garden of Light’ (see page 127); ‘Akimba and the Magic Cow’ (African – see page 114); ‘The Invisible Hunter’ (American Indian – see page 181).

For the eight-year-olds and over, besides more complex folktales from many cultures, a recommended story-centred curriculum for home and school is the one followed in the Steiner education model. In progressive classes this covers the Norse myths, African, Persian, Indian and Egyptian stories, and the Greek and Roman legends. Teachers also write their own pedagogical stories to introduce educational content and concepts such as teaching the alphabet. Such stories can help turn ‘stones’ into ‘bread’, dry facts into life-filled pictures, transforming what might otherwise be tedious into an inspirational experience. Stories and storytelling methods are also used to address challenging behaviour and children’s social and emotional development. In Steiner schools, teachers and children experience the wisdom and power of such stories as an integral, daily part of education.i

Such a story-centred curriculum can develop children’s imagination, helping them grow into ‘juicy plums’ as adults and preventing the ‘dried-up prune’ syndrome mentioned in Chapter 1. I encourage all parents, therapists and teachers to find ways to bring this wealth of stories from our mythological history into children’s lives, along with those we creatively devise ourselves. Through the light of stories we can nourish and help our children develop into imaginative, well-rounded young adults, ready to carry our world into a positive future.

ⁱ	See, for example: L. Francis Edmunds, Introduction to Steiner Education: The Waldorf School (details in reference section)

7

Truth and Morality

Is it true?

Whether telling stories of your own, or stories from folk culture, it is important to consider the question of ‘truth’ and stories. Some people are concerned that folk fairy tales do not render truthful pictures of life and are therefore unhealthy. Psychologist Bettelheim states that the truth of fairy stories is that of the imaginative realm, rather than ordinary causality. Fairy tales are about archetypes, spiritual realities, which give forms of truth other than so-called ‘realistic’ ones.

I was once privileged to listen to an American storyteller called ‘Floating Eagle Feather’. He began his story session with an open question:

Some people believe the world is made of atoms. I believe the world is made of stories. What do you believe?

Before writing or telling a children’s story, the storyteller needs to know what she believes. As you tell a story a child will subtly sense whether you yourself are really ‘inside’ and ‘behind’ it, or are only ‘making something up’ that you are not fully connected with.

For an answer to the child’s question, ‘Is it true?’ many fairytales offer an answer to this in the first line of the story. Beginnings such as ‘Once upon a time …’ and ‘In olden times, when wishing still helped.....’ make it clear that the stories take place on a different level from everyday reality. If children persist with asking whether a story is true, Nancy Mellon, an experienced storyteller, suggests one could simply say, ‘Let’s listen to the story again’. Or the answer might sometimes be, in a mood of wonder, ‘I think this story is truer than true!’

Nature research

When writing a nature tale, getting the facts right is important. If the wind in your story is blowing across a rainbow bridge, and the colours of the rainbow need to be mentioned, then be careful to describe the correct colour order (unless, of course, the story is about a mixed-up rainbow!). If writing a story about a baby wombat, it helps to do some research into how it enters its mother’s pouch from under and behind, not in front like all the other marsupials. An Australian colleague of mine made this mistake in a wombat story and a child in the class corrected her. Since this time she has been careful to research her nature tales more thoroughly.

Ideas for writing stories can be greatly enriched through observation and research. Important and fascinating facts on the habitat, diet and characteristics of animals and birds can help generate new ideas for the story journey. All my fauna- and flora-based stories have been created from research combined with, where possible, my own observations of the particular animal, tree or flower. Observing that the stalk of a pumpkin is attached to the vegetable in a star-like shape gave me the idea for including a dream about a star in my ‘Pumpkin Munchkin’ story (see page 173). My research on whale songs motivated my choice of a whale for a story on whingeing (whining) behaviour (see page 100).

Fibs, lies and tall tales

Most dictionaries define a storyteller, firstly, as someone who tells or writes stories, and secondly, as someone who tells fibs or lies. There is definitely an interesting connection between telling stories and telling lies. Lying or bragging contests can bring out wonderful storytellers, and for some of us who have never told a story before, telling a ‘tall tale’ can often be the easiest way to have our first go. The word ‘fiction’ of course, means something that is not strictly true – and without it our culture would be immeasurably poorer. The life of the imagination conjures a multitude of scenarios which, while not materially true, may nevertheless express spiritual truth. They are indeed often ‘truer than true’.

Most, if not all human beings tell lies in one way or another. Some brand their lies ‘white lies’ to justify their use. Others never let the truth get in the way of a good story, and embellish a travelling tale to keep their listeners attentive for longer. Fishermen have the reputation for bragging about ‘the one that got away’.

I think everyone would agree, however, that for healthy emotional and social development children need to learn about the consequences of lying, both ‘white lies’ and serious lying. Children also need to learn how to let their conscience be their guide, something that is not by any means an overnight process. Awareness of a moral aspect to one’s conduct, together with a preference for right over wrong, is one of the most important outcomes of a truly holistic education. The ‘fictions’ of storytelling are actually a wonderful aid in this process throughout childhood.

Truth is such a vital subject for our time, especially given the corruption in so many leading institutions and government bodies. Children can learn to lie at such an early age: perhaps as a protective tendency, or as a game and experience from which they get quite a thrill. It is sometimes difficult for parents and teachers to know how to sort out lies while still honouring children’s imagination.

One helpful hint that I learnt from my teaching years is to be careful not to jump in and label ‘lies’ as ‘lies’ when children are very young. For pre-school children the adult’s role should be to show by example, and to find ways to gently lead a ‘lie’ back to truth, not to quickly ‘set it in concrete’ by labelling it. For example, when a child tells the group about his travel adventures at the weekend (and the teacher knows the child was really at home both days) she could say ‘Thank you for your story, Dylan’, and not ‘That is a lie Dylan, you know you were home all weekend’. This way the teacher is simply acknowledging that the child had a need to make up a story, perhaps to match other children’s exciting weekend stories. Of course, if Dylan’s habit of making up ‘bragging’ stories persists, the teacher may need to discuss it with the parent and find out the deeper reasons behind this – it may be a behaviour he has developed at home to get the attention of his busy parents or impress his older siblings.

Another situation that often arises with pre-schoolers is when a child says to the teacher, ‘I don’t have anything in my pocket’ when really the teacher knows he has just pocketed a favourite little toy from the classroom. Instead of the teacher labelling this a lie, a gentler yet still effective approach is to simply put a hand into the child’s pocket and say, ‘Goodness me, a little toy has jumped in here. Can you help me put it back in its home?’ In this way the teacher is leading the child into ‘right action’ and the child should feel much better for this, hopefully learn from it; and will certainly appreciate not being labelled!

Great care still needs to be taken once children are school age. It is best not to discuss the lie or theft in front of the whole group, but to take the child aside for a quiet chat. Nancy Mellon uses the metaphor of a ‘thorn’ when giving advice on dealing with a lying or stealing child. She believes that dishonest deeds are carried like a thorn inside the child, and direct exposure can push the thorn deeper rather than releasing it.

This leads to the use of stories. Stories have the potential to help the thorn find its way out. By leaving the listener free to come to his own conclusion, stories can feed the growing conscience in a nourishing and wholesome way.

Every culture has developed stories to teach the consequences of dishonesty. The Grimm’s story, ‘The Wolf and the Seven Kids’ shows that lying does not get you what you want. A South African Xhosa tale with the same theme is transcribed in this book (see page 108). In both stories, the wolf or hyena, pretending to be the mother, repeatedly lies to the children in order to get inside their house.

The lovable Italian story of the wooden doll Pinocchio, whose nose grew longer with every lie he told, has a powerful message here for children who have a serious lying habit, as does the classic story of ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’.

Lying contests and the use of humour

To address the theme of lying with older children in a light-hearted way, a teacher or family member could introduce the idea of holding a lying contest, or a contest of ‘tall tales’. Dividing into small groups, one child can act as the judge and the other two can compete with a false story or tall tale. The theme could be as simple as ‘What I did last weekend’ or ‘What happened to me on the way home from school yesterday’. If there are enough contestants, you could start with heats and lead up to semi-finals and a final.

Lying contests can generate a lot of fun. They also help create awareness of the difference between truth and falsehoods, and the appropriate time and place for both.

Telling lies for entertainment has been an accepted part of many cultures for hundreds of years. In parts of Africa, and America’s deep South, lying contests are part of the folk history of black people. There are also records from Anglo-Saxon times of a tradition called ‘Lying for the Whetstone’. Apparently an old Whitsun custom, it has been celebrated in England since the 14th century. He who could tell the greatest lie was rewarded with a whetstone to ‘sharpen his wit’.

‘Tall Tales’ have their origin in the bragging contests that often occurred when the rough folk of frontier communities gathered. A uniquely American or Australian story form, they usually feature a larger-than-life, or superhuman, main character with a specific task, and a problem that is solved in a humorous or outrageous way. Tall tales and lying contests have appealing use for primary children – both telling existing tales and writing new ones.

Moral or moralistic?

For thousands of years, as we have seen, cultures worldwide have been using the medium of story to teach morals and values. Many traditional folk stories have moral qualities, and the listener receives these in different ways. This is all part of the nature and ‘power’ of story. In writing or choosing stories, it is important to be aware of the difference between a moral tale and a ‘moralistic’ or cautionary one. A moral tale, through an imaginative story journey, should leave the listener free to come to his own conclusion.

The delightful African tale, ‘Akimba and the Magic Cow’ (see page 114), is an example of a story journey with moral qualities. Dishonesty has its consequences and the thief ends up with a ‘beating stick’ fourth time round instead of a cow that produced gold coins, a sheep that produced silver coins, or a chicken that laid eggs. Because of the story structure, with its repetition of events, by the time the stick is introduced the listener is hoping for a change, ready for a change, wanting a change! And how delightful that the final sequence is humorous, that a serious message about dishonesty can be delivered through the medium of humour.

The listener has a similar experience in the folktale of ‘The Magic Fish’ (see page 136). The wife is greedy and keeps wishing to own more and more – a house, a mansion, a castle, the sun and the moon! To the great relief of the listener she ends up losing everything and is back in her little shack on the beach at the end of the story. In the words of one of my sons, sighing with relief at the end of the story, ‘She wanted too much!’

A moralistic tale, however, is more like a sermon or lecture disguised as a story. Such a story was once written by a teacher to encourage good manners in her class. This story was about a child whom no one wanted to play with because he didn’t say please or thank you. Then he learnt to say please and thank you and the children wanted to play with him. Her words seemed more like a lecture or a direct instruction. They lacked the metaphoric and journey qualities of a story.

For a story to help children come to their own moral conclusions, usually some kind of imaginative journey is required. There seems to be a definite need for ‘indirectness’. A story is in danger of being moralistic when the purpose is too obvious. I can usually tell the moralistic ones by the way they make me feel a little squeamish at the end. In contrast a good moral tale leaves me feeling well satisfied, like a nourishing meal. But how I receive and react to a story may be very different from you. I only put these thoughts on paper to get you thinking, if you are planning to write your own therapeutic stories.

Most importantly, whatever stories you choose to write and tell, be careful not to end them by giving the children a summary of your perception of the moral values. Leave the listeners free to come to their own conclusions – trust in the power of the story!

MY STORY JOURNEY

From Dried Prunes to Juicy Plums:Why Use Stories?

Imagination and storytelling

Food for imaginative thought

Scepticism and self-doubt

Listing reservations

2

Weaving Stories into the Family Fabric

The helping Brownie

Car tales and tangled knots

Imaginative play and the ‘little folk’

Imaginative family traditions

Poetry and creativity

Bottles and bubbles

‘Cloud Boy’ wins a healing victory

Weaving Stories into the Teaching Fabric

Poetry leads to story making

A fire story to heal trauma

A wild pony story

A simple shoe story

Environmental healing tales

Knitting needles and pocket knives

Tales from the story doctor

Writing and sourcing, sifting and sorting

WRITING THERAPEUTICSTORIES

‘Story’ and ‘Behaviour’

What is a story?

Some metaphors for ‘story’

What is a therapeutic story?

What is behaviour?

Influences on children’s behaviour

Context and relationships

Evaluating adult influence on children’s behaviour

Identifying ‘challenging’ behaviour

Labels and categories

Imbalance to balance

Describing ‘challenging’ behaviour

The tapestry of discipline

5

A Construction Modelfor Story Writing

Metaphor

Clues for choosing metaphors

Journey

Resolution

Analysing therapeutic stories

The value of props

Focusing on specifics

Adjusting stories to different situations

Repetition, rhythm and rhyme

Happy and hope-filled endings

6

Different Stories for Different Ages

Story rhymes and rhyming stories

Lullabies and nursery rhymes

Story games, finger plays and body rhymes

Cumulative tales and nonsense stories

Nature tales and ‘everyday’ stories

Categories of complexity

7

Truth and Morality

Is it true?

Nature research

Fibs, lies and tall tales

Moral or moralistic?

From Dried Prunes to Juicy Plums:
Why Use Stories?

WRITING THERAPEUTIC
STORIES

A Construction Model
for Story Writing