Fairy Tales or Everyday Stories: Which is better?
I recently was asked by a long time colleague what I thought about a short message on a reel regarding an MIT psychologist’s post that parents who are talking about their day rather than the “usual fairy tale” helped children develop their “brains 3X faster.” According to the reel, MIT “observed 400 families across different countries.” The parents spent “just seven minutes” a night “sharing feelings” and in “just two months, kids showed a vocabulary boost of one full year.” The short message gave credit to “emotional modeling.”
This increase in” focus, attention, and in vocabulary” makes total sense to me. First, when we talk about others such as others in books, fairly tales, etc., the cognitive load of language goes up, leaving the young child behind. The child has no semanticity regarding these other people (authors, characters, screen people). And, long term memory is semantic memory. So, the “usual fairy tale” is at a formal level of thinking (15 years plus) for a young child. The characters of a book are at a concrete level (7-11) for a young child. Both the formal and concrete levels are too high for much meaning since we all begin learning the scaffold of meaning or semanticity of new concepts (represented by vocabulary) starting at a preoperational level (lowest semanticity for concepts).
Some children will begin imitating the patterns of these higher levels of thinking such as being a character of a fairy tale. But, the thinking is not increasing, patterns are just being imitated. So, the concepts would not develop quickly.
When we talk with young children about what we did, how we felt, what we did in response; then children are able to relate to us at a preoperational level of thinking (agent to agent). Quickly, the meaning of what the parents did is added to what the child does (basic agent, actions) resulting in the brain connecting the peices into a connectome where new tags (words) for concepts may be added. It should be noted that basic semantic relationships like agents and their actions are the universal basis for all languages. This is why we use “I-stories” as a VLM for beginning a lot of conceptual lessons in education; we want to use an easy access to thinking (concepts) for all learners.
The MIT study sounds interesting and the results are not surprising to me, given what we know about language and cognitive levels. I would like to caution readers about making the jump between preoperational levels of response to a situation or a feeling and emotional language. For example, “I was upset” could mean I was unsure of how to respond, what I was to do, why the other person acted a certain way, how to problem solve the situation, etc. Being “upset” is not-tangential and therefore is a formal concept. If problem solving is important to the parents or educators, then they will need to make the connections between the formal emotional state such as “upset” and how they problem solved the situation to say, ‘it turned out okay.” Making the connections with explanations of what the parent did that day to solve the problem will increase the child’s thinking faster than just “modeling emotions.”