Look, the world is complicated. There is so much for your kids to understand, so much for you to explain, so much to teach them. What’s the best way? How do you get the ideas, the facts, the lessons, and the values to stick in their brain?
The best way, as we’ve said, is story. It has always been thus.
Aesop (our favorite edition here). Hans Christian Anderson. The Bible. Did you know Da Vinci wrote a number of fables too?
You don’t lecture. You don’t barrage. You explain. You illustrate. And most of the time, you do it obliquely, not directly. “He argued much from analogy and explained things hard for us to understand by stories—maxims—tales and figures,” Lincoln’s law partner William Herdon reminds us. “He would always always point his lesson or idea by some story that was plain and near as that we might instantly see the force and bearing of what he said.”
So it goes with our children. We learn through stories—whether it’s the story of Cinncinatus or a story about the time when you were their age. We learn when people share moments of vulnerability, of their hard-won experience. We don’t like it when people tell us the point, we like it when they show us.
So stop thinking about giving them all the answers and start thinking of stories. It’s the best way to teach.
P.S. Over at Daily Stoic, we’re often asked how parents can teach the timeless lessons of Stoicism to their children. As Lincoln’s example reminds us, our best tool we have as parents is storytelling, which is why we created two illustrated Stoic fables to read to our children:
- The Boy Who Would Be King, a fable about the journey of a young boy who was chosen as the next emperor and, by training himself through philosophy, would go on to become one of the wisest and virtuous leaders in history (much like Marcus Aurelius).
- The Girl Who Would Be Free, a fable about a young girl who was born into the harshest life possible, but, through the power of philosophy, liberates herself from slavery and frees the minds of millions of people in the centuries that follow (much like Epictetus).
Grab both at the Daily Dad Store to give your children an education in the school of life today!
