Stories in the Home

Elementary teachers, junior librarians, and competent Sunday-school teachers are now fully expected to meet the story-hunger of childhood by good stories. But educated mothers also are coming to realize that these workers for their children cannot be expected to do all the story-telling. Parents, and especially mothers, should talk with their children about the stories they have heard, and supplement these with the cultural classics, such world stories as are found in this collection, or with those from other sources.

“The mother’s heart is the child’s best schoolroom.” The home is the first and holiest school. The home is the institution which is more important and fundamental than all others. Teachers, ministers, and other educators can cooperate with, but can never be substitutes for, educated, cultured parents, who, by the great law of family life, necessarily exert the most direct influence upon the life of the child, and especially during its formative and most impressionable years. An educator of wide reputation says: “If, at the end of the sixth year, the child has not acquired self-control and a fair ability to be an agreeable member of society, it is the fault of the home. A failure to arrive at such a happy state of affairs may be due to economic or social conditions back of the home, but normally this responsibility for the care and training of children lies with the parents.”

Because so few mothers feel competent to cooperate in this creative art of story-telling, such a course should manifestly become an integral part of the education of every young woman of culture. This is, in part, being provided, and soon must universally find a place in the curricula of high schools, normal colleges, State universities, and denominational institutions of learning. Many who are now mothers have had no such training. All the greater reason, therefore, that the mother who would be competent should avail herself of such books as “Stories and Story-Telling,” by E. P. St. John; “How to Tell Stories to Children,” by Sara Cone Bryant; “Stories and Story-Telling,” by Angela M. Keyes; “The Children’s Reading,” by Frances J. Olcott; “Some Great Stories and How to Tell Them,” by Richard T. Wyche; or “The Moral Instruction of Children,” by Felix Adler. Any one of these books, or the present volume alone, will assist any mother to improve her opportunity of telling stories to her own children or to develop her own natural gift into a conscious art, so that ability may fit opportunity more perfectly.

It is well for the mother to have a definite plan for children’s story-telling. Some mothers I know have set aside half an hour in the morning after breakfast, when the husband has gone to the office and her older children have gone to school, as the best time for what they call “the morning stories of the Bible” (early chapters of Genesis) for those who are in the early morn of life. Less fortunate mothers have set aside Sunday afternoons. Others set aside a half-hour after supper on two or three evenings each week, or even one evening, if that is all that can be spared. Still others devote, faithfully, one-half hour to their children’s story-telling before the children go to bed, or even after they are in bed, and the children love that half-hour as “the best of all the day.”