I was born in Ireland at the time when storytellers came to our home to share a fairytale or two. This in turn gave me and my ten siblings a zest for reading. We took the stories they relayed to their attentive audience as gospel, and incorporated them into our childhood adventures. We read every adventure book we could get our hands on.
The influence of the storytellers and reading adventure books certainly contributed to our wealthy and happy childhood. Not monetary wealth, as back in the sixties in Ireland that type of lifestyle didn’t exist. My parents carried that burden on their shoulders, while we carried on with our wonderful childhood.
Our imaginations ran riot and everything we did was an ongoing adventure, and guaranteed to be continued on the next outing.
In our strides, we dealt with typical home issues, school issues, friend issues and a variety of other issues that came down the turn pike. But for some reason, issues never took over our mindset. The storytellers and adventure books were far more important. Hence, our characters were molded and our resilient uniqueness was created.
As children we were never encouraged to read, we just read. It was par for the course. We had nothing but our storytellers, our books and our imaginations, and yet we had it all.
Now reading is an issue for many kids. Yes, a lot of kids read and enjoy it, but a lot of kids won’t pick up a book. There are all kinds of foundations and organizations working hard towards getting children to read and enjoy it. Libraries are constantly putting on story time and a handful of kids will be there with their parents, grandparents or chaperones.
Why is that? Is it because there are too many other distractions for both children and parents? Has life in the twenty-first century taken hold of all of us? This era of convenience and the world at our fingertips is overwhelming. There are simply not enough hours in the day to fit in the much-needed and critical downtime anymore.
Our children are on fast forward with us. If we don’t stop and take time out for them and ourselves to enjoy the simplest of pleasures like storytelling, their young, adventurous, make-believe lives will pass them by and suddenly they are teenagers, who missed out on the most imaginative time of their lives.
Children are the same now as they were way back then and beyond that. Storytelling is as exciting a pastime now as it was in days of yore, a good old-fashioned fairytale is always welcome. The imagination of a child kicks into high gear and their ingenuous minds go to work.
Even Einstein, the Godfather of imagination has something to say about fairy-tales; “If you want your children to be brilliant, read them fairy-tales. If you want them to be geniuses, read them more fairy-tales. Imagine a fairytale influencing a child to the extent that he or she could end up with a greater imagination than they already have, and possibly become the next great imagination of our times.
Albert Einstein’s great intelligence and originality left us with a bundle of knowledge. His name is synonymous with genius. But he also credited his outstanding accomplishments to a greater thing, “I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world”.
What’s the moral of the story? The moral of the story is a child’s imagination can encircle the world just the same as old an schooler’s imagination. Fairy-tales can unlock a disillusioned mind and generate the most ingenuous of thoughts. More power can be added to a child’s imagination, if we would only read them fairy-tales.
The author understands the struggles some children have reading. Enticing reading tools are necessary to stimulate the act, therefore, a complimentary mp3 download of her first novel, ‘Nanny Reilly’, together with a beautifully illustrated 99 page ebook is available for all children from her website http://www.nannyreilly.com
The author’s books are listed with The Library of Congress and have recently been shelved and downloaded by the schools and libraries throughout the State of Montana.
Parenting viewpoints from parents in the trenches, because parenting doesn’t come with a manual. In addition to