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The Impact of Storytelling on Kids’ Brains

Posted on by Gavin Bodkin
Storytelling stokes creativity in children

by Gavin Bodkin, MBA

If you’ve ever watched a child’s face while a story is unfolding (eyes wide, mouth half open, body utterly still) you’ve seen the impact of storytelling in real time.

For thousands of years, human beings have gathered around firelight to listen to spoken tales. Children, especially, drift toward stories the way butterflies drift toward flowers. We think of storytelling as magic, and in a way, it is. But it’s also biology. While a child listens, neurons fire, blood flow shifts, and the brain quietly rewires itself.

So what, exactly, is the impact of storytelling on children’s minds? What happens in their brains as they listen, and how can we use that to support their growth and well-being?

Let’s explore.

Key Takeaways: The Impact of Storytelling on Children

  • Storytelling “wakes up” the brain. Studies show increased blood flow in the prefrontal cortex when children listen to live stories compared with looking at picture books – evidence of deeper engagement and mental work.
  • The impact of storytelling includes stronger problem-solving skills. As kids follow plots, they’re constantly predicting, organizing, and connecting cause to effect, building the cognitive machinery they’ll later use in real life.
  • Stories grow empathy and social awareness. Children try on characters’ feelings and choices, using story worlds as safe places to explore right, wrong, kindness, and consequence.
  • Storytelling eases stress and pain. In hospital settings, even a single storytelling session has been linked to higher oxytocin (the “bonding” hormone), lower cortisol (the stress hormone), less pain, and better moods in children.

What Is Storytelling, Really?

When we talk about the impact of storytelling, we’re not just talking about cartoons or endless video clips. We’re talking about the oldest version: one human, using voice, language, rhythm, and often music, to weave a narrative into the minds of listeners.

It’s a living exchange:

  • The storyteller offers sounds and images in words.
  • The listeners build those images inside their own minds.

Across human history, this simple act has:

  • Fired the imagination of thinkers, inventors, and dreamers.
  • Preserved culture and values long before we wrote anything down.
  • Entertained and bound communities together around shared narratives.

Modern media are just descendants of this ancient practice, but the purest impact of storytelling still comes from spoken word delivered live, where imagination does the heavy lifting.

Why the Impact of Storytelling Matters in the Digital Age

The imagination is the engine of every bold leap humans have ever taken. From the first hunter picturing a better spear tip to the Wright brothers imagining a machine that could lift into the sky.

Imagination doesn’t need much:

  • Words
  • Rhythm and music
  • Meaning

From these few ingredients, the mind can build entire worlds.

But in our digital age, most of the imagery we consume is already finished. Screens pour ready-made pictures into our eyes all day. For adults, this can be numbing. For children, whose brains are still wiring up, it can mean fewer chances to practice creating their own mental images.

Here the impact of storytelling is crucial:

  • With no pictures supplied, children must generate the visuals themselves.
  • They wonder, “What does that dragon look like?” or “How old is the girl?” or “What might happen if he opens that door?”
  • That inner questioning is exactly the kind of mental exercise that builds flexible, creative minds.

The Impact of Storytelling on Children’s Brains

Research across cognition, creativity, emotion, memory, and family bonding all converges on a single conclusion: the impact of storytelling on childhood development is profound and overwhelmingly positive.

Let’s look at some of the main dimensions.

1. Cognition: Storytelling and Brain Activation

    One of the clearest ways to see the impact of storytelling is to watch what happens in the brain.

    In a study of children aged 4 to 11, researchers compared two situations:

    1. Listening to stories told aloud by an experienced storyteller
    2. Looking at picture books being read to them

    They measured blood flow in the prefrontal areas of the brain, which are involved in attention, planning, and higher thinking.

    What they found:

    • During oral storytelling, prefrontal blood flow increased over time.
    • During picture-book reading, it decreased.

    In other words, the impact of storytelling was to activate the children’s brains more intensely than simply looking at images.

    Why? Because with no pictures given, the brain must:

    • Construct visual scenes from language
    • Track characters, motives, and relationships
    • Predict what might happen next
    • Adjust expectations when the story takes a turn

    This is hard mental work, but it feels like play. Picture-book reading is still wonderful, but it can be more passive, because so much is visually supplied.

    2. Problem Solving: Stories as a Practice Ground

      Real life presents children with puzzles – emotional, social, and practical. To handle them, children need to develop:

      • A sense of cause and effect
      • The ability to weigh options and consequences
      • The skill of imagining different outcomes
      • A balance between reason and emotion

      Here again, the impact of storytelling is powerful. Stories act like a simulation for complex situations.

      As kids listen, they silently ask:

      • “What would I do if I were that character?”
      • “If he lies, what might happen?”
      • “If she forgives him, does that actually help?”

      The impact of storytelling is that it lets children practice decision-making safely, inside an imagined world. Researchers call this “narrative reasoning”, using the structure of stories to make sense of life events.

      We can’t just hand children a rulebook for every situation. They need to feel their way through nuanced scenarios, and stories are one of the gentlest and most effective ways to let them do that.

      3. Language Development: The Sound and Shape of Meaning

        Another major impact of storytelling lies in language development.

        Spoken stories don’t just convey vocabulary. They carry:

        • Tone and pitch
        • Rhythm and pacing
        • Dramatic pauses
        • Facial expression and gesture

        For a child, this is a multi-layered language lesson disguised as entertainment.

        In research with preschoolers, regular exposure to storytelling has been linked to improvements in:

        • Grammar
        • Vocabulary
        • Sentence length
        • Sentence structure and complexity

        The impact of storytelling on early literacy is twofold:

        1. Comprehension grows, as children learn to decode not just words but the emotional and musical qualities of speech.
        2. Expression grows, as children absorb patterns of how to tell, describe, and explain… how to hold someone’s attention with their own words.

        Over time, kids who hear many stories have a mental library of how language can move, build tension, resolve, and comfort. Their communication and interpersonal skills deepen because they’ve repeatedly witnessed language in action.

        4. Empathy and Social Awareness: Stories as Empathy Machines

          A crucial impact of storytelling is on empathy.

          Young children don’t come pre-installed with perspective. It’s not natural for them to consider, “How is my parent feeling right now?” or “What might this be like for my little brother?” Those capacities arise slowly, with experience.

          Stories accelerate this process.

          When a child listens to a tale, they are constantly:

          • Slipping into the minds of different characters
          • Feeling fear, joy, embarrassment, or relief through someone else
          • Watching how actions affect others positively or negatively

          The impact of storytelling here is that it gives children safe emotional rehearsals. They can:

          • Feel the pain of a lonely character
          • Experience pride when a small hero succeeds
          • Sense regret when a character makes a hurtful choice

          Research on oral storytelling with school-aged children has found that it supports:

          • Self-expression
          • Identification with characters
          • Empathic understanding of self and others
          • More genuine, two-way communication with adults

          Children build a sense of right and wrong not just from rules, but from feeling stories unfold inside them. Storytelling gives them that chance again and again.

          5. Pain, Stress, and Healing: Storytelling as Gentle Therapy

            There is also a very tender, very practical impact of storytelling: its ability to reduce pain and stress.

            Imagine a hospitalized child hooked up to machines, far from home, frightened by strange sounds and smells. Adults can explain what’s happening, but explanation alone doesn’t always soothe.

            In a 2021 study of hospitalized children (many being treated for respiratory conditions like asthma and pneumonia), researchers set up two activities:

            • Listening to a live storyteller
            • Engaging with riddles, used as an active control

            They measured:

            • Oxytocin (associated with bonding, safety, and trust)
            • Cortisol (associated with stress)
            • Levels of reported pain and mood

            After just one storytelling session, the impact was clear:

            • Oxytocin levels increased
            • Cortisol levels decreased
            • Children reported less pain
            • Their emotional associations shifted in a more positive direction

            The likely explanation is that storytelling transports the child. For that span of time, the hospital room recedes. In its place: a forest, a ship, a mountain, a village, a dragon’s cave. This transport offers:

            • A break from immediate fear and discomfort
            • New ways to reframe their own situation
            • A gentle workout in emotional regulation and resilience

            So the impact of storytelling is not only cognitive and social. It can be physiological, easing the nervous system, even in difficult circumstances.

            6. The Lasting Impact of Storytelling on Childhood

            When we take all of this together, a picture forms:

            The impact of storytelling on children is:

            • Cognitive – It activates the brain, builds attention, and trains problem-solving.
            • Linguistic – It enriches vocabulary, grammar, and expressive power.
            • Emotional – It grows empathy, perspective, and moral understanding.
            • Physiological – It can lower stress, soothe pain, and foster a sense of safety.

            So yes, storytelling is fun. Yes, it’s ancient and simple. But in the life of a child, it is also serious, foundational brain-and-heart work.

            When a child looks up at you and says, “Tell me a story,” they are asking for far more than entertainment. They are asking, without knowing it, for all the benefits embedded in the impact of storytelling:

            • to imagine
            • to feel
            • to understand
            • to connect
            • to heal

            And you, with just your voice and a little time, have the power to give them all of that.

            Read More

            Photo Credit:

            <a href=”https://www.freepik.com/free-photo/full-shot-kid-wearing-rocket-toy_33418427.htm#query=kids%20imagination&position=33&from_view=search&track=ais”>Image by pikisuperstar</a> on Freepik

            Tchaikovsky in the Pandemic

            Posted on by Odds Bodkin

            I just finished listening to Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto #1 in my kitchen, while recovering from a day of hard physical work cleaning out my garage and carting off the last leaves of autumn here in New Hampshire. In my town of Bradford, if you don’t turn on your front porch light this Halloween, trick or treaters will not ring your doorbell. We’re doing that this year, Mil and I. We’re going to light the wood stoves and lay low. Just today I put on and took off my mask numerous times, a task almost as tiring as taking moldy old sleeping bags to the dump.

            A young woman (violinist Alena Baeva) was the soloist for the concerto, and she was note perfect and found yet a few new subtleties in performing this beloved and well-worn piece.

            Of course, this was a pre-Covid performance. It was a scene of happy aesthetes assembled together in a concert hall somewhere, put up on YouTube. No masks. Everyone breathing the collective air normally. A roaring applause at the end, everyone standing up in joy, just having been transported.

            All this will come back. It really will. We just have to hang in there a little while longer.

            That’s because our beloved scientists have almost figured out the bioinformatics on this virus. Just as breathlessly as I listened to this concerto, I await that day. It’s just around the corner.

            —Odds Bodkin

            Can’t Go Out? Going a Little Stir Crazy with Your Kids?

            Posted on by Odds Bodkin

            Well, there are always Odds Bodkin stories to free your child’s mind. The first few seconds are usually enough to engage their attention, even children accustomed to a constant flow of visual stimuli like TV or video games. Odds’ stories are for kids 4 and up. There are many age-appropriate categories.

            To buy Odds Bodkin’s audio stories as downloads, you don’t have to go out, which is a good thing nowadays. Instead, just visit his online shop, purchase what interests you, and download to your device. The mp3s are ready to play. Nature stories. Fairy tales. Viking myths. Greek mythology. From two-minute tales to spoken-word epics that last for hours. All told with characters, music and a legendary joie de vivre, which we all need around now.

            Joie de vivre. That’s French for “the joy of life.”

            Find out more here.

             

             

            A TRUSTED VOICE

            Posted on by Odds Bodkin

            Studies warn nowadays that increasing numbers of young kids are entering school without deep trust in an adult figure. Any adult figure. You can blame it on family breakup, drugs, poverty, or just frenetic modern life in general, I suppose, because even in affluent families, plenty of kids have to compete with their parents’ smartphones to get their attention.

            Whatever the causes, Story Preservation Initiative (SPI) has decided that my audio stories for young kids might help by providing a consistent and trusted voice in their lives.

            I’m honored and delighted to have my works viewed in this way, and to be part of a school-based program like SPI’s.

            LEARN MORE.

             

             

            Do Silicon Valley Execs Keep Their Kids Away From Screens? Yes.

            Posted on by Odds Bodkin

            Why do Silicon Valley executives raise their children technology-free? This headline from The Guardian says it all: TABLETS OUT, IMAGINATION IN: THE SCHOOLS THAT SHUN TECHNOLOGY.

            They do it because they want their kids to be imaginative and mentally healthy, basically. Looking out over the wasteland of anger, narcissism, teen suicides, obesity and incivility that social media networks have caused in young lives recently, many of these tech wizards are scared for their own kids.

            Like King Midas, everything they touched has turned to gold. But don’t forget the old story: When King Midas touches his own daughter, whom he loves, she turns to gold, too. That’s the end of her.

            Digital Addiction begins with kids interacting with screens. The colorful, always-changing worlds they find are so much fun that when they’re suddenly without their screens and look up to see the real world around them, it simply moves too slowly. It’s boring. This causes a kind of free-floating, stimulation-seeking depression.

            Down through the ages, kids engaged in creative play with toys and role-playing, attempting to do what grownups did, but in miniature. It has always been this way. But not now, not in the dopamine-laden world of video games and social networks. Not unless the kids’ lives are balanced by getting them away from these devices.

            It’s ironic. Now that the digital masters of the universe are having families, too, they realize this, smart as they are. Heck, they built these things to be addictive. And yes, they love their kids, too.

            So what is the indispensable skill they want their children to develop at these very expensive, very selective kindergartens and elementary schools where less is more?

            Imagination.

            What grows imagination best?

            Creative outdoor play, kids playing with kids, without any adults around.

            If that’s not possible, what’s the next best thing?

            Storytelling.

            As Einstein said, “If you want your child to be intelligent, read them fairy tales.”

            Wait a moment, you might say. Odds Bodkin is using digital media at the moment. Isn’t that a bit hypocritical?

            Well, no.

            That’s because my imagination developed long ago, when I was a kid, playing outside all day, and then, after coming back home, listening to my dad tell me stories.

            BUSINESS INSIDER article for more

             

             

             

             

             

            Hard-Hitting Adult Storytelling Sunday July 29th in New Hampshire

            Posted on by Odds Bodkin

            Hard-Hitting Adult Storytelling Sunday July 29th in New Hampshire

            If you want to grab some elemental Greek mythology, tragic and beautiful, told for adults, mark your calendar for Sunday, July 29th. The tale you’ll hear, much like Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, won the hearts of 200 convicts in a California prison one afternoon, so much so that I actually signed autographs on scraps of paper and napkins afterwards for a half an hour. As an audio, this 100-minute epic won the national Golden Headset Award from Audiofile Magazine, among other awards.

            With so much violence afoot in our culture today, it’s more relevant than ever.

            It’s called Hercules in Hell, and it just might break your heart.

            I’ll be performing it with my 12-string guitar at 7:00 pm at the Riverwalk Music Bar in Nashua, New Hampshire on Sunday evening in two weeks’ time. One of the more interesting features of this work, other than the full, moment-to-moment guitar score, is that unlike in most of my storytellings, I don’t narrate. I never appear. Only Hercules does.

            Tickets are $13 in advance for good seating, and $13 at the door.

             

             

             

            STORYTELLING LOVERS DISCOVER THE EPIC DRIVE

            Posted on by Odds Bodkin

            STORYTELLING LOVERS DISCOVER THE EPIC DRIVE

            Fans of storytelling have discovered Odds Bodkin’s EPIC DRIVE, the product that contains all this master storyteller’s musical spoken-word works. From adventure epics to titles for young children, the flash drive, loaded with mp3s and cover art, arrives in the mail. Plug it in and load eighteen widely varying titles, from The Odyssey for teens to The Little Proto Trilogy for young kids.

            Meaningful, ethical stories with a plus: original music, character voices and vivid vocal effects!

            Support creativity and mental health in your family by listening together and discussing these classic stories. Kids never forget. Get yours today.

            THE EPIC DRIVE: All Odds Bodkin’s Stories!

            “THE BEST ANTI-BULLYING ASSEMBLY WE’VE EVER HAD, HANDS-DOWN”

            Posted on by Odds Bodkin

            “THE BEST ANTI-BULLYING ASSEMBLY WE’VE EVER HAD, HANDS-DOWN”

            A school principal wrote me recently, commenting on GOLDEN RULE, my storytelling assembly for elementary kids. Sure, I tell stories for adults, but it’s close to my heart, this empathy issue. Kids raised without notions of civility and simple human kindness toward others––no matter what somebody else looks like or where they come from––just makes the bullies feel that power. In the long run, though, it hurts them just as much.

            Although many Americans follow faith traditions, just as many don’t these days, and with that change has come a loss of religious teaching stories, traditionally told to kids by adults in their lives. In their absence and in the presence of cynical cartoons and visual games, the fabric of civility has worn thin in lots of children. It’s not their fault. They’re kids. They’re not born civil; they need to be taught why it’s important.

            Be kind. Treat others honorably. Yes, you can say those things to kids, but nothing penetrates the cruelty they see in media like a spoken-world story told by an adult. Instead of saying “do this,” a good Golden Rule story simply offers a lesson about power and its uses. Kids can’t help but internalize its impact because they’ve been opened up. They’ve been opened up because their minds are overwhelmed. The boys. The girls. The ADHD kids, all attentive. With the voices, music and wild sounds, the storytelling is too evanescent for them to ignore.

            At a public school in Massachusetts the other day, my young audience looked like the United Nations. Kids from everywhere. Never knowing what religions, if any, their families practice at home, I tell stories from non-religious wisdom traditions. Folktales from Japan, Ireland, Africa, India and Italy. And Aesop’s Fables from ancient Greece, which is about all I can fit into an hour. But I always ask the kids the same questions about them afterwards, and about the Golden Rule.

            And if they’ve never heard “Treat others the way you would like to be treated” before they’ve attended a GOLDEN RULE assembly, they certainly know it by the time it’s over.

            If kids don’t get these kinds of stories from adults in America when they’re young, stories that buoy up their best angels and sink into their souls, when they get to high school, more and more of them are so fragile and full of violence that they misuse their power and end up thinking it’s okay to bring guns to class, and all to often these days, in the ultimate act of bullying, to use them.

             

            –Odds Bodkin

             

             

            A Stolen Ring and an Unwanted Kiss

            Posted on by Odds Bodkin

            An unsophisticated youth out in the world for the first time, Percival comes upon a young woman in a knight’s pavilion. His mother’s words come into the country boy’s mind, “If a lady gives you a kiss, ‘tis a great honor. If she gives you a ring, ‘tis a double honor.”

            Stupidly, he forces her to kiss him and pulls off her wedding ring, thinking he’s now been honored. Instead, he’s ruined her life, although he does not know it. Not until much later in the epic, when he meets her again with her angry husband (he thinks she’s been unfaithful), does Percival return the ring and confess what he’s done.

            If modern boys do not know how to treat women with courtesy, perhaps they haven’t yet heard The Hidden Grail: Sir Percival and the Fisher King, Odds Bodkin’s 90-minute Arthurian tale about chivalry.

            Billboard writes “one of the best spoken-word stories we’ve ever heard.” The reviewers were a mother/daughter team.

            Get it here or as part of the $99 download special at Odds Bodkin’s Shop.

             

            TWO SHOWS IN NH THIS WEEKEND/No Cellphones Required

            Posted on by Odds Bodkin

            “Smartphone dystopia” is a term recently coined by Google engineers who now send their young kids to elite Silicon Valley schools that ban smartphones and iPads. Read about that here.

            To completely escape smartphone dystopia, at least for an hour, tonight I’ll be performing a story show, THE HARVEST: Tales of the Land at 6 pm in Gilford, NH for the Belknap County Farm Bureau. My audience: farmers. Three disarming and insightful adult stories, with echoes of the Monsanto vs organics war. It’s a private function.

            However, Sunday night’s show at 7 pm is public. HEARTPOUNDERS: Halloween Tales of Horror unfolds at the Riverwalk Music Bar in Nashua, NH. Composed of the grittiest, most unsettling supernatural tales I know, the show includes mythic material from New England, Russia, China and other far flung places. It also explores Samhain, the old Celtic celebration, and how it was turned into All Hallow’s Eve by the Church during the conversion centuries following St. Patrick’s and others’ arrivals among the Druid pagan sacrificers of Northern Europe.

            Tickets are $10 in advance, $13 at the door.

            You’ll have a chance to enjoy your natural imagination at work, without a single “Like” button.

            Have a great weekend!

            THANATOS ON THE WEB, JUST FOR TEENS

            Posted on by Odds Bodkin

            Thanatos was the ancient Greek god of death. He seldom made an appearance in person. If you think about it, that makes sense. He only shows up when there’s no time left to tell a story about him.

            As the son of Night and Darkness, his siblings were Old Age, Deception, Blame, Suffering, Doom, Strife, Retribution and Atropos, a goddess of death herself. She’s the root of our modern word “atrophy.”

            As you can sense by his mythical brothers and sisters (the Greek gods were personifications of various human conditions) Thanatos normally has to do with death in old age. Old people die when their times come. That’s the way of nature.

            But a new Digital Thanatos Ethic has appeared among teens. Witness the young Massachusetts girl who was just convicted of urging her depressed boyfriend to kill himself in his monoxide-filled truck. Witness the tens of thousands of other young girls who are cutting themselves, along with the millions of boys who worship all-powerful killer monsters they inhabit inside avatars, living a false heroism that has nothing to do with the real world around them.

            “The other day I put up a self-harm picture,” she says. “I was alone and in a dark place. […] Of course, nobody would help, but posting it boosted my confidence a little; finding it buried in amongst all the other self-harm posts reminded me I’m not alone.” Full article in The Guardian.

            Sites like these where depressed teens commiserate and urge each other to suicide and self-harm are appearing on the web like poisonous mushrooms. Depression blogs. Teen suicides on Facebook Live. Anorexia-promotion sites. This is a new species of digital connection so unnatural, so profoundly unhealthy, that parents and policymakers should take notice and shut these sites down, or at least get their kids away from them. And from cynical, exploitative TV shows that explore and justify them.

            As for First Amendment considerations, media like this is the slow-moving equivalent of yelling “fire” in a crowded theater. Loneliness is one thing. But lonely kids who never meet each other in person gathering together online to compare ways to hurt themselves?

            Even in an utterly secular world, that’s just not right. It’s a digital disease.