The Story Step

The Story Step started as a germ of an idea one winters day. There was a lot of online noise at the time about how terrible men are, as well as ‘school readiness’ being in the press and I wondered:

“What if any child, anywhere in the world, could go to a place where they could find a story read to them by a man who they feel represents them? Could we address two very worrying social ills with one, cracking storytelling project?”

Firstly then, why men?

Well, because there are oodles of good men out there, but because of our tendency to live in the shock-horror extremes of our newsfeeds, they’re all lumped together in a big, misandrist clump.

As a now-grown child of a single dad, that makes me cross.

As a therapist and an author of children’s books, it makes me think…

How do we improve outcomes for all our young people if they’re being so well conditioned to divide themselves? And they are… in those extreme corners of social media, they’re learning that men are dangerous, and women are victims. Period.

There’s no nuance in the newsfeed.

SOME men are dangerous, and SOME women are victims. It’s also true that SOME women are dangerous, and SOME men are victims.

Overall, there are far more good humans than nefarious ones though…

Good humans deserve to be treated like good humans. Children and young people deserve to see their adults behaving in ways that promote respecting people whose behaviour deserves that respect and not tolerating behaviour that doesn’t.

The extreme nature of social media feeds is breeding anxiety into our young people without us even realising it – they’re absorbing everything they see and hear online, and we should all know by now that the bad stuff is easier to believe; and much more likely to be promoted by the algorithms.

If someone tells us they like our shoes, we tend to become a bit bashful and embarrassed by the compliment – we’re often not really sure how to respond.

If they tell us they hate our shoes, we know exactly how to react, don’t we?!

We’ll spend the rest of the day supremely self-conscious about the shoes, and we’ll likely never wear them again if we know the person who hates them will be there. Whenever we look at the shoes, we’ll think immediately of the ONE person who said they didn’t like them. We certainly won’t think about the tens of other people we encountered that day who made no comment about the shoes or even the one person who complimented them – they must’ve just said that to make us feel better, right…?

That’s just one example of a real-life interaction that’s potentially enough to overwhelm our whole day.

Now, remember that our young people are being subjected to this kind of criticism dozens of times PER MINUTE on the internet…

So, we need to be responsible for addressing the lack of balance here in the real world – we can’t out algorithm the algorithms, so we need a response we CAN control.

We can definitely control The Story Step…

Secondly then, why stories?

Anyone who’s anyone in the business world says you need to share your ‘why’ to hook your ideal customers in, so the intellectual ‘why’ for The Story Step is simple:

“One in 11 (9.4%) children and young people said they do not have a book of their own at home, rising to one in eight (13.1%) children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Of these children, those who receive free school meals, boys of all ages and teenagers are the most likely to say they have no books of their own at home.

The research also found that children who say they own a book are 15 times more likely to read above the level expected for their age than their peers who say they don’t own a book (28.8% vs 1.9%) and are four times less likely to read below the expected level (12.9% vs 48.1%).”

(Source: Book ownership and reading outcomes | National Literacy Trust)

I’m not a massive fan of the phrase “school readiness” but figures and statements like the ones above, tend currently to be clumped together in reports and statements about school readiness, alongside toilet training* and being unable to sit still.

As far as I’m concerned, very small children aren’t supposed to sit still and I don’t want them to read because they have to do it for school, I want them to develop a love of books and stories that will last a lifetime; I want them to read because they want to.

The ‘brain benefits’ of reading are, I hope, a no-brainer(!) but the social, emotional, and relational benefits of reading far surpass those…

In May 2012, the UK Government published a report about reading for pleasure, and it found,

“Evidence suggests that reading for pleasure is an activity that has emotional and social consequences” (Clark and Rumbold, 2006).

(Source: reading_for_pleasure.pdf )

Well, there’s a revelation…

Just ask any kid who lived in a house (pre internet!) where their adults weren’t particularly available to them – they’d have found endless hours of escape between the pages of a good book.

Even kids whose parents were there for them will have enjoyed a bedtime story or reading with their adults.

Adults who were read to as children are far more likely to read for pleasure as adults, and they’re also more likely to read to and with their own children.

And stories, well they create connections, don’t they? And connection is the antidote to trauma, isn’t it?

Connection between generations – we’ve all got that one story about that time auntie Vi did that thing at grandma’s party, haven’t we?!

And all families have characters – jokers, heroes, villains…

We live in our own stories; those we tell ourselves and those others tell us.

What stories do we want our young people to be telling their own kids? Stories about falling stars, money-making goats, and hairy fairies? (all available on The Story Step right now, by the way!)

Or stories about being bullied, sidelined, compared and judged by strangers?

Yes, it IS that important, and yes, these habits and memories WILL last a lifetime…

We can’t go back and change the start of the story, but we can choose to turn the page, start a new chapter and own the ending.

That’s why good stories, being read by good men, for no reason other than they too believe that a child enjoying a story read by an adult should be part of the primary experience of all children, are so important.

Especially now when our young people’s attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, and their self-worth is being so fiercely judged and measured online, constantly.

(*On the issue of toilet training, schools are places of primary safeguarding. Asking staff to perform personal care in schools is a safeguarding risk the school is often unable to easily mitigate – in short, personal care requires more adults than are available in most classrooms and what would you rather schools spent money on? Toilet chaperones or books and pencils?)

The Story Step

We can definitely control The Story Step…

Secondly then, why stories?

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