When grandparents tell stories, children gain more than memories: 3 science-backed benefits

There is something about a grandparent telling a child a story that feels almost old-fashioned now. It could be the story of how a parent behaved as a child, the family’s first home, a difficult time the grandparents lived through, a funny mistake someone made decades ago or simply, “When I was your age…”At the time, these may sound like amusing tales, but according to science, these tales do much more than fill an evening. Here are three things research supports.

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Family stories can help children build a stronger sense of self

Children gradually develop an understanding of who they are partly through the stories their families tell about them and their shared past.A study conducted by Family Process Institute examined how families talked about shared experiences and found that more coordinated, validating family narratives were associated with higher self-esteem in preadolescents, particularly girls. The researchers suggested that these conversations can become an important setting in which children develop a sense of themselves as individuals as well as members of a family.This is where grandparents can have a particularly meaningful role. They carry memories that parents may not have experienced themselves. A grandparent can tell a child, “Your mother was terrified on her first day of school too,” or “Your grandfather lost his first job and had to start again.”Suddenly, the child’s own struggle does not feel quite so unusual. That is one reason family stories can become a quiet source of resilience.

Storytelling gives children a richer workout for language

This one is particularly beneficial for younger kids. Stories require children to listen to events unfold over time. They encounter unfamiliar words, descriptions, explanations, dialogue and more complicated sentence structures than they might hear during everyday conversation.Research published in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, conducted on children’s narrative development shows that vocabulary and grammar are closely connected with their ability to understand and produce stories. In one study of 336 children aged 3 to 6, vocabulary, grammar and phonological awareness explained a significant amount of the variation in children’s narrative abilities.While this does not mean grandparents automatically give children better language exposure than parents, grandparents often have a different storytelling repertoire which certainly adds developmental value.

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Stories can strengthen social and emotional skills

There is something else that happens when a child sits down with a grandparent and listens to a story: they are learning how to connect with another person.In 2024, a research was conducted on 465 children aged 9 to 12 in Malaysia, along with interviews with 25 grandparents. The research published in the Journal of Research on Adolescence found that children who experienced greater warmth and support from their grandparents tended to have stronger social skills. The quality of the grandparent-grandchild relationship appeared to be an important part of that connection.That does not mean that every story told by a grandparent automatically makes a child more socially skilled. But storytelling gives grandparents and children a simple way to build the kind of warm, two-way relationship that research keeps pointing to.Think about what happens during a typical story. A grandparent may describe being scared on their first day at school, getting into trouble as a child or dealing with disappointment. The child listens, asks questions and sometimes compares the experience with their own life. Those little exchanges give children opportunities to think about how another person feels, why they behave a certain way and how people deal with difficult emotions.

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What the story is really about

So the next time a grandparent begins with, “Let me tell you what happened when I was young…”, it may be worth letting the story run a little longer. Put the phone down. Let the child ask questions. Let the grandparent wander into a memory that has nothing to do with the original question. Because sometimes, the stories children remember years later are not the carefully planned lessons. They are the ones they heard sitting beside someone who was there.