Storytelling, one of our positive-parenting-tips tips for teaching patience with children

Why storytelling is one of our favorite positive-parenting-tips tips we use with our kids.

The second topic of our series of positive-parenting-tips tips and teaching patience and sharing to kids, is all about storytelling.

The concept itself doesn’t need much explanation. There are plenty of situations where you want your kids to be patient in order to avoid difficult situations.  We’ve been searching for some positive-parenting-tips tips that can be used to help small kids the concept of patience. So we tried to teach the kids to be patient by engaging them in a fun story. All this requires is a basic knowledge of what interests your kids at the moment (Princesses? Dinosaurs? Trains? Dancing? …) and build your story around these. The more interactive you make it, the longer you can keep it going. Victoria sometimes amazes us by making up the story all by herself.

Let me tell you about a recent experience we had just to show you how powerful this storytelling can be …If you like it, you can add storytelling to the positive-parenting-tips tips you use with your kids 🙂

Not long ago Victoria was in the hospital for a polyp surgery. Prior to the surgery, some pretests needed to be done such as a hearing test, looking at the polyps and also a blood test.

The idea of a blood tests would already get many parents nervous: You imagine the needle and soon after you picture of your kids going through the roof screaming of pain and fear. I suppose the reality gets sometimes close to that cause the nurses asked us to apply some cream one hour before which basically functions as a local anesthesia.

An so, my thoughts were with my wife that day as she accompanied Victoria to the hospital. First thing coming home in the evening I wanted to know how it went. Hearing her describe the events of the day was both fun and amazing. Here are a couple of extracts of her ‘report’:

‘When Victoria was ready on the bed, the nurse asked me to have her turn her head away so she wouldn’t see the needle and get afraid of it. To fully distract Victoria, I started telling her about our upcoming holiday.” (note: Recently Victoria showed an increasing interest to go swimming and she has always been fond of planes, so my wife made us of that to get Victoria engaged) “And so I told her how we’d take the plane and go to a hotel with many swimming pools. I was enthusiastic and so was she. She started telling me all the things she wanted to do on our holiday.”

“When the nurse was done she told me she was amazed about how patient Victoria had been throughout the job. “She really trusts you”, the nurse told me. I of course like to believe she trusts me, but according to me she was just so much into the story that she had no more attention for anything else.”

Amazing! A normally painful event got handled in a very smooth way. And the best of all was the reaction of Victoria at the end when she told my wife “But mommy, I didn’t see what the nurse did!” with a very disappointed face. She had been so curious about the whole thing and now she missed it all … 🙂

Storytelling works most of the times for us. Whenever we need our kid(s) to be patient (in a waiting room, in the car, at the doctor, …) or whenever we need/want them to do something they don’t like (blood tests, combing their hair, …), me or my wife would start talking to them in an enthusiastic and engaging way telling them a story. So that’s one of our positive-parenting-tips tips: storytelling.

Not sure how much the storytelling teaches the kids to be patient, but it sure compensates the lack of patience and gets you through some potentially hard times. That’s why storytelling is high on the list of our positive-parenting-tips tips.