Some Thoughts on Parenting, Part 2

The Importance of Story-telling

I met my great-grandmother when I was six. She was 99, living with my great-uncle Dale in Cleveland. My grandmother, my uncle, and I drove up to visit them and go to SeaWorld. Yes, there was a SeaWorld in Cleveland.

By then, Great-Grandma Patrick had some dementia. She got people mixed up. But she could still tell a story. I remember one in particular. She told me about walking to buy cookies as a little girl, paying just a penny. The idea of a single coin buying that many cookies stuck with me. I’ve told that same story to several of my own kids when they were young. Who doesn’t like cheap cookies?

Life is shaped by stories. They form little lives into the people they become. If we want our children to grow into what God intends, we have to tell them stories, good ones, true ones. And “true” means both what really happened and what faithfully reflects enduring truth, even if it didn’t. Part of godly parenting is learning to be a storyteller.

Of course, they must be told the greatest story ever told, the storyline of all Scripture.

They need to know that the world was made perfect by a good and generous Creator, one with whom we had real fellowship. Then, through our own self-centered and unjustified rebellion, we fell, and we dragged the whole creation down with us into misery and death. But God, being merciful and full of grace, came in the flesh. He died in our place, satisfying the wrath of God, rose again, and triumphed over evil. Now He is seated at the right hand of the Father. We are waiting for His return, when He will set all things right.

That story, creation, fall, redemption, consummation, is told through a thousand smaller stories across the Bible. Your kids need to know the whole thing and the parts that make it up. That means teaching them Adam and Abraham, Samuel and Malachi, Paul and the rest. Sometimes you tell a single story and let them see a piece of the whole. Other times, you pull the threads together so they can see the tapestry.

Children’s Bibles can help. We used The Big Picture Bible for a time, though we eventually set it aside over concerns about images of Christ. Still, the basic idea is right: give them simple, faithful retellings that help them grasp the shape of the story.

Don’t underestimate what grabs them. Kids love the epic parts, Exodus, the judges, the kings, the battles. Use it. Let those stories hook their attention. Just make sure they don’t stay isolated. Show them how they fit.

Teach the Bible. Get these stories into them. If you do, they’ll start to interpret the world through them. They’ll compare people they know to people they’ve met in Scripture. That’s exactly what you want.

You also have to tell them stories from your own life, and the ones handed down to you by your parents and grandparents. Family stories matter. They function like a kind of family Genesis.

The word Genesis means origin, source, beginning. It’s the story of where everything came from, how the world began, how man fell, how the people of God took shape. It’s not just history; it’s identity. It explains who we are and why things are the way they are.

Your family stories do the same thing on a smaller scale.

They tell your kids where they came from. Why you grew up the way you did. Why your family lived where it lived. Why certain traditions stuck. Why some relationships are strained and others are close. They explain why Grandpa drank too much, why an uncle disappeared, why your parents fell in love, why there’s a silence around certain names. They display the reality of sin, consequence, mercy, and providence.

They also carry the small, human details that stick, like the time your great-grandmother could buy a pile of cookies for a penny.

These stories help your kids make sense of their world.

And they want to hear them, especially when they’re young. Later on, they may act like they’ve heard them all before. But when they have kids of their own, those same stories come back. They start telling them again.

If you don’t tell your stories, you cut them off from something real. They lose access to lived examples of sin and its cost, of God’s mercy showing up in ordinary life, of decisions that shaped the family they now belong to.

Don’t underestimate the scale of it. What feels small to you feels big to them. Those little stories open up a whole world.

And of course, you should read to them.

You start simple, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, just to build the habit and the love of it. There’s nothing better than when one of your little kids brings you a book, climbs into your lap, and settles in.

It usually starts with silly, light stories. Then you move into things like Little Bear and Frog and Toad, which I’ve always loved. They’re mostly about friendship. They don’t hammer you over the head with a lesson. Overly moralized stories can backfire. Better to tell stories that quietly normalize what’s good, right behavior, right affections, just by showing it.

As they get older, you can widen things out. I read mine The Wizard of Oz series, The Chronicles of Narnia, and My Side of the Mountain, a story I loved as a kid. We also read missionary biographies, especially Hudson Taylor, whom I named my firstborn after.

At this point, my older kids are all readers, or at least listeners. A lot of that comes through audiobooks now. And while there’s something unique about holding a physical book, turning the pages, and sitting still with it, the main thing is getting good stories into them. However it happens, I suppose.

A good story tells the truth, one way or another. Sometimes fiction does that best. It gets inside the human heart, its motives, fears, longings, in a way that sticks. In that sense, some of the truest stories ever told are the ones that never happened.

Here’s a challenge I used to run with my three oldest when they were younger.

I’d give them a setting to choose from: mountains, ocean, or a run-down futuristic city. Then a character type: robots, pirates, or aliens. Then a plot: searching for an escaped prisoner, fighting in a civil war, or traveling with a carnival. Sometimes I’d throw in a villain, an evil alien overlord, a treasure-hungry dragon, or a super-genius gorilla.

Then I had to tell a story that held all of it together.

Sometimes the stories were surprisingly good. Most of the time, they were ridiculous. I’d stumble through them, make it up as I went, and the kids loved it all the more for that. The robotic bearded lady would look off across the deck and spot Manila, the vanilla gorilla, trying to recapture the carnival workers he’d enslaved to feed his endless appetite for bananas. It was nonsense, but they still bring this up every once in a while.

Story time should be both planned and unplanned.

It happens around the dinner table when you read Scripture during family devotions. It happens around campfires and at the edge of bedtime. It shows up at funeral meals, when stories start flowing about the ones we’ve lost, the good, the strange, the funny, the hard.

Tell your kids stories.

God uses them. He uses them to shape boys into men and girls into women, to give them a sense of the world, their place in it, and the kind of people they’re meant to become.