Story Time and the Emotional Life of Your Child

A child who can name what they’re feeling has a measurable advantage over one who cannot. Not just emotionally — academically, socially, in every domain of life. The ability to identify, understand, and manage emotions is called emotional intelligence, and it turns out that reading is one of the best tools we have for developing it.

When a character in a story feels afraid, a child practices recognizing fear. When that character chooses courage anyway, the child practices the idea that feelings and actions are not the same thing — that we can feel one way and choose another. This is the beginning of emotional regulation, and it’s far easier to learn in the safe distance of a story than in the heat of a real conflict.

Psychologist and author Daniel Goleman, who popularized the concept of emotional intelligence, has written extensively about the role of narrative in developing empathy. Stories, he argues, are the original empathy machines — they require us to inhabit another’s perspective, to care about people we’ll never meet, to feel the weight of consequences we haven’t experienced. Children who consume stories voraciously tend to develop stronger theory of mind — the ability to understand that other people have thoughts, feelings, and desires different from their own.

A 2013 study published in Science (Kidd & Castano) found that reading literary fiction — as opposed to popular genre fiction or nonfiction — produced measurable improvements in theory of mind in adult readers. While children’s research is ongoing, the implications for read-aloud are significant: the richer and more character-driven the book, the greater the emotional workout for the child.

Practically, this means: when a character feels something, stop and talk about it. ‘How do you think she felt when her friend left?’ ‘Have you ever felt that way?’ ‘What do you think he should do?’ These brief conversations — taking three minutes out of a twenty-minute read-aloud — may be the most valuable part of the whole experience.