Autumn 2024
How does storytelling introduce children wisely to challenging family relationships?
An immigrant couple from two different countries felt deep dismay about their birth families. They wondered how to create a healthy present-time family culture while protecting their child from their troubling backgrounds. They spoke with increasing warmth and enthusiasm about their cultural roots, as we gathered ingredients for their age-appropriate inter-cultural and multi-lingual storytelling. I asked if there was any reason they couldn’t invite their imaginations to play freely to portray their favorite family values, like Laura Ingall Wilder’s did as she wrote The Little House on the Prairie, her immensely popular family saga. With permission and role models they soon relaxed. Together, they began to imagine two different, lively, fun -loving families who had come from their original homelands to America. The couple laughed as they made up amusing old-country names for them. As I asked a few questions, their imaginations picked up steam in the direction they wanted to go. “Might these two imaginary families live in a neighborhood similar to yours? Maybe the grannies and grandpas speak your two different languages in your story, and almost understand each other because the children love the American-ese they are learning at school, and act as interpreters? What happens when the families in your story get together for a backyard picnic to share their favorite foods and songs? Do the children become friends, even perhaps best friends? Do their pets play together?” As their extended family cultures began to tangle together in playful fictional light, the couple truly enjoyed their task, and a new international saga was born! Without their usual angst, smiling with relief, their emotional dilemma began to resolve. They realized they could invent delightful child-friendly episodes that nevertheless shared some of their genuine family truth.
Well- tuned creative imagination can lift and inform the spirits of adults as well as young children!
Explore with Nancy Mellon how your intentional creativity can help children in your care, with their inherent human family and tribal instincts, to experience the fundamental security of family belonging, no matter what the circumstances into which they were born and now live?
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