KINSHIP SNACKS: How To Tell a Really Good Story to Kids

Featuring Jurassic Park. Plus: Good mail; a brief account of the crimes of the baby; friendship across the parenting divide; when kids ask about people in crisis; Liverpudlian baby babbles in Scouse.

Welcome! I’m Lisa Sibbett and this is The Auntie Bulletin, a weekly newsletter about kinship and community for people who choose to help raise other people’s kids – and the people who love us. You can read my archive here.

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Your Weekly How-To

Today, I explain how to tell engaging stories to kids. Humans have been telling stories for entertainment and edification since we first learned to build a fire and gather around it, and when you tell a story out loud, you join one of the oldest and most wonderful traditions there is. Consider: someone told stories to you, and someone before that told stories to them, and someone before that told stories to them, and on and on backwards through time in a probably-unbroken chain all the way back to the first time a person said, “There was a time when….” All you have to do to take your place in this noble and beautiful lineage is tell a kid a story.

The first thing to know is that you’ve got two main options: 1) tell or adapt a story you already know, or 2) make something up. The first option is easier, and I highly recommend you start with known stories as you’re honing your craft. You’ll learn a lot that you can apply to next time, and known stories are fun to tell because you don’t have to worry about what happens next — so you can just focus on being entertaining.

Here are a few great sources for known stories:

• Your favorite movies from your youth – preferably ones you’ve seen over and over and you know well enough to quote from

• The kid’s favorite stories to watch or have read to them, which you can feel free to adapt or modify, to the extent that they will let you

• Folk tales, fairy tales, and (my favorite) cautionary tales¹

In this how-to, I focus primarily on known stories, and at the end I’ll offer some suggestions for making up stories of your own.

A good story starts with a good hook. I often wind up telling stories because I’ll be chatting with one or more kids and some topic comes up, and it reminds me of a story. For example, say I’m drawing dinosaurs with some kids and we’re thinking of funny things to put in the picture.

“What if you drew a T-Rex eating a guy who’s sitting on a toilet?” I might say casually. “Like what happened in Jurassic Park.”

The children’s heads swivel toward me: “WHAT?”

“Like in Jurassic Park!” I say, as though of course they have seen a rated PG-13 dinosaur film that came out 25 years before they were born.

Wide-eyed: “What’s Jurassic Park?”

If you want to find out why Jurassic Park is an excellent “known story” to tell to kids, get a list of other terrific kid-friendly stories, learn a whole bunch of tips for nailing your delivery, and find out how to subvert stereotypes and help your kid audience become good humans along the way – upgrade to a paid subscription now! It’s $5 per month or $50 for the year, and it’ll help me be able to keep writing The Auntie Bulletin, which I really, really like doing.

The first time I ever told Jurassic Park to kids, I described Dr. Ian Malcolm as smoking hot (Jeff Goldblum is the sexiest man alive and I will die on this hill) and then later I was telling the kids about this scene, where after the kid gets blown off the re-electrified fence, his hair smokes, and one of the kids listening got the two kinds of “smoking hot” confused and now in this particular social circle the phrase “smoking hot” refers to what happens to your hair if you get electrocuted. As for you, for a mere $5 a month, you can climb right on over this fence without doing any damage to your hair.