Marinske Visser

Bedtime Stories: A Review of Storytelling and Children's Literature within Evolutionary, Cognitive and Moral Studies of Art and Narrative

Originally written 15-01-2024. Published 29-09-2025

ABSTRACT: An applied literature review of the evolutionary, cognitive and moral theories on the functions of narrative and the arts. Particularly focusing on the possible applications to children's literature and parental storytelling.

A rabbit walks into a bakery and asks the baker: "Do you have any carrot cake?" The baker replies: "Unfortunately, we do not have any carrot cake for sale." The next day, the same rabbit enters the bakery again and once more asks: "Do you have any carrot cake?" Again, the baker has to inform the rabbit that he has no carrot cake. The baker, who does not wish to disappoint the rabbit a third time, bakes a carrot cake that evening. On the third day, the rabbit once more arrives and asks: "Do you have any carrot cake?" The baker enthusiastically replies: "Yes! We do!" The rabbit responds: "Disgusting, eh?"

My father was, and is still, a master storyteller. Especially when it comes to bedtime stories. He would even bring his stories to life through my plush animals, most of them following a similar style and structure as the popular puppet shows of Jan Klaassen en Katrijn or, as the English know them, Punch and Judy. The "story" written above was one of my favourites and I would push my plush rabbit Flappie into my father's hands demanding he perform it night after night. On the other hand, my dear mother may not have been as good at making up stories from the top of her head, but she was still able to catch my attention reading from our admittedly large collection of (bedtime) storybooks.

What I wish to convey with this somewhat nostalgic introduction is that bedtime stories were an important part of my childhood and the happy memories arising from it. As, I am sure, they are for many others. It is thus with great surprise that I discovered the absolute lack of theory on them within the academic field of storytelling.

The phenomenon of bedtime stories can have a large impact on early childhood development in a number of ways. From socioeconomic advantages later in life (Segall, 2011), to parent-child bonding (Andersson & Turesson, 2023, Campbell, 2014, Reyes, 2019), the transmission of values and family tales (Campbell, 2014), and the most well-known and often-spoken-about aspect of improving literacy. This list of advantages is in no way exhaustive, nor is it specific to reading to your children only at bedtime. It is, in fact, important to read to your children throughout the day as well, making sure that bedtime stories do not become an activity to keep them quiet and make them go to sleep (Young & Michael, 2015. P. 3). However, it is still the bedtime stories that have stuck in my head after all these years, showing that this moment of the day has at least some impact within the child's mind. Additionally, where in earlier times the mother might have stayed home with the children, modern-day parents tend to both have a job and work during the day, likely making it much more common that bedtime is the only moment of reading and storytelling within the household.

The main problem with approaching the phenomenon of bedtime stories academically is currently the lack of work speaking on it. What is often written about though, are two closely-related topics: storytelling and children's literature. Having collected a swathe of sources on both, from the realms of evolutionary, cognitive and moral studies of art and narrative, I will here provide an overview of some of these sources and nestle the concept of bedtime stories within them. The main question will thus be: How can we look at bedtime stories through the lenses of evolutionary, cognitive, and moral theories on art and narrative?

Once upon a very long time ago

When apes turned into humans, grouped together and cultures formed, narratives began to be told. Gottschall, among others, calls humans the "storytelling animal" (2012) and not without reason. Art and narrative are universal in all human societies (Boyd, 2009, Sherman, 2008, Vanderbeke & Cooke, 2019) and our interest and ability to engage with them normally develop in early childhood without any special training or education (Boyd, 2009). Furthermore, as Boyd describes, the longevity of art and narrative, the development of similar major forms of the arts throughout societies, the high costs of these activities and their emotional aspects make it clear that art and narratives are an evolutionary biocultural trait of humanity (2009).

While stories that ring true are rather more obvious in their evolutionary purpose, allowing for information transfer between people and peoples, fiction seems to be counterproductive at first glance (Boyd, 2009, Vanderbeke & Cooke, 2019). Yet, as Catherine Storr points out while speaking about fairy tales: "In each new generation of children there are millions to whom these stories are as welcome and necessary as their daily bread. They must supply some very basic need" (1976, p. 65). This claim is only proven by the fact that a phenomenon like bedtime stories has endured every technological and cultural change that our societies have encountered throughout time.

However, if the telling of (fictional) stories is evolutionary, it must have a function to outweigh the high costs in time, energy and resources of this activity. These functions are manifold but can be roughly placed within one of two categories: cognitive functions and socio-cultural functions. These two categories will be explored in the next two sections along with the cognitive and moral-focused explanations of stories.

Thinking of Tales

The telling of tales is so important to our understanding of the world, that it is baked into our brains to do so. The left sides of our brains are specifically wired to explain the data they receive from our senses, processing it into a coherent story (Gottschall, 2012). This is an adaption that we cannot suppress, our brains will infer a story out of data, and where they cannot create a truthful one they will spin a fictional yarn for us to follow, as can be seen in the Kuleshov experiment (Idem.). The pattern-finding machine living in our heads is an inherent trait necessary for our daily functioning and while it is in itself making stories to make sense of the world and events going on around us, it is also primed to understand stories that are being told to us. Narratives depend on our competencies to understand events and event sequences, as well as the uniquely human capacity of meta-representation (Boyd, 2009). Additionally, the pattern recognition and inference systems within our brains work through the information we receive so efficiently, rapidly and, most importantly, automatically that we are not only unaware of these processes happening but also of the fact that the inferences we make far outstrip the original perceptual input (Boyd, 2009).

These rich outputs are not only there for general sense-making, they could be described as humanity's self-soothing mechanism as well. Humans have an innate desire to impose a pattern on the things that mystify and frighten them (Storr, 1976). The mythologies of our societies are a strong example of this type of fear management. They give meaning to our existence and abolish explanatory vacuums (Gottschall, 2019). The bedtime stories told today still hold this function, mostly because they could be traced back to those same mythologies of yore. Through games and stories, children tend to flirt with what might frighten them to develop better control over those feelings (Langfeldt, 1976, Tucker, 1976). Additionally, a child's imagination might run rampant and create horrors that they cannot inherently put a name to, stories help them gain words to express their fears and eventually settle them through communication with others (Tucker, 1976). Moreover, the folk and fairy tales that are abundant in the realm of bedtime stories specifically nourish the unconscious mind in similar ways, as they allow for the identification of basic human experiences of primitive survival-focused urges and identity formation that have been obscured and placed within the subconscious by the progress in human evolution (Storr, 1976).

Yet, the development of emotional regulation is only one part of the larger evolutionary and cognitive function of stories. Boyd claims that the main purpose is that of cognitive play, which allows us to hone a variety of cognitive skills in the essentially riskless environment of a story (2009). In connection with bedtime stories, this fact is often limited to an improvement of literacy for children. However, stories also allow for the development and amplification of memory, processing of (social) information, the capacity to direct and shift attention, (social) pattern detection, opportunity and risk assessment, and dealing with setbacks (Boyd, 2009). The improvement of cognitive skills requires consolidation of information in neural tissue and strengthening of the connection between neurons in the cerebral cortex (Idem.). This improvement relies on experience and, thus, experiencing something more often will strengthen the memory and learning trace of that and similar experiences (Idem.). But this experience does not have to be firsthand. The 'thought experiment' that a story provides causes those same neurons to fire as if you were producing the action yourself (Boyd, 2009). This allows, especially children, to safely build up a basis for their thinking and reasoning, as well as a sense of the more complex social world under the surface of everyday interactions and an exploration of themselves and the difficult situations they may or not be facing at that moment (Boyd, 2009, Tucker, 1976). Moreover, stories enhance our creativity and stretch our imagination (Boyd, 2009, Sherman, 2008). "[...] And once stretched, an imagination stays stretched" (Sherman, 2008, p. xix). Boyd describes this as probably the most important function of pure fiction, as it allows us to train our brains to see beyond the here and now, thus giving us an evolutionary advantage in a vast world of possibilities (2009). While this use of our imagination is often neglected in adulthood, activities such as reading or telling bedtime stories allow the child as well as the parent to activate their fantasy, fulfilling a need within both (Tucker, 1976).

So far I have only described the cognitive advantages that stories provide to individuals, however, they also are inherently social. Primarily because, as is the case with bedtime stories, the mental development caused by stories relies on parental prompting and engagement with the child within these, essentially collaborative, activities (Boyd, 2009, Tucker, 1976). However, in Donald's 'Art and Cognitive Evolution', he specifically mentions art's function as influencing the minds of an audience, calling it a form of cognitive engineering (2006) and Herman's view of storytelling as an instrument of mind is equally based on the fact that narratives are socially embedded (2013). Moreover, the activity of listening to a story together creates a sort of "story trance" within the audience, binding them together in a shared experience (Sherman, 2008) that provides the cognitive developments mentioned previously and engages the socio-cultural functions of storytelling (Herman, 2013).

The Sweet Pill of an Entertaining Story

The overarching socio-cultural function of storytelling is that stories glue a society together (Boyd, 2009, Donald, 2006, Gottschall, 2012, Herman, 2013, Sherman, 2008). Through the shared experience described above, but also through the dissemination of knowledge and values, and the development of a moral sense that they provide (Idem.). As Gottschall describes, until the last few centuries, storytelling was an everyday and intensely communal activity that mentally and emotionally synched up the audience in front of the teller and delivered the same message, binding them together by reinforcing a set of common values and strengthening the idea of a common culture (2012). While we are now consuming our stories in a much more individualistic way, we are still sharing a communal experience of bonding, only we are now spread out over time and space (Gottschall, 2012).

One part of this bond comes from the distribution of knowledge, especially our communal and private histories that have found their way into stories and have been or shall be repeated for generations. Many communities and families wrap their history into a narrative for preservation and thus create a large external memory storage system that will outlast any computer (Herman, 2013, Ong, 2002, Sherman, 2008). In general, many of the stories we still tell today are some variation of those that have been told for centuries until it was finally written down (Sherman, 2008). Especially, the fairy tales that dominate the bedtime rituals of children contain a large share of mythopoetic qualities (Tucker, 1976), harking back to the times and values of yore that still stand firm within today's society, mainly due to their universality and nourishment of our subconscious as described earlier.

The other part consists of the morals that stories are able to convey and reinforce. Sherman beautifully describes the power of stories in this regard: "Wrapped in the sweet pill of an entertaining story, a moral goes down easily." (2008, p. xviii). Stories allow us to pass along and reinforce group values (Carroll, 2004, Sherman, 2008) but also to see through another's eyes, gaining phenomenal knowledge and an awareness of the perspectives of others (Boyd, 2009, Carroll, 2004, Plantinga, 2023, Sherman, 2008).

While Plantinga claims that his object of study, films, allow for a greater sense of phenomenal experience and thus knowledge than other forms of storytelling (2023), I would not necessarily agree as live storytelling allows for a great sense of immediacy as well (Sherman, 2008). Additionally, the debates on morals found within writings on more traditional forms of storytelling and children's literature underpin the moral and educational power of these categories of entertainment.

The moral panic surrounding stories goes back to Plato's opinion that storytellers and theatre would morally corrupt society (Gottschall, 2012) and still echoes in the opinions of some that if they just choose the right books, with the right values, for their children to consume, then the future will be better (Council on Interracial Books for Children, 1976). The moral education side of stories should not be dismissed out of hand, as fiction has always been used to preach certain morals (Gottschall, 2012) and stories such as fairy tales are indeed powerful stuff (Tucker, 1976). The price we would have to pay, if we were to ignore all possible social consequences of the stories we tell our children, would be too high to justify (Tucker, 1976).

What is most often taught through stories, however, is the conventional, agreeable, moral status quo of the society in which they are told (Gottschall, 2012) and arises out of the contemporary social and political situation (Butts, 2010, Donald, 2006, Tucker, 1976). The human imagination can imagine almost anything, but it draws a line where our inherent moral convictions stop, we will not go along if someone contradicts our moral understanding of the world (Gottschall, 2012). Our enjoyment and emotional reactions to stories are partially caused by our concerns about the characters getting what they deserve (Idem.). Thus, going against the moral grain, in the time and space of live storytelling would be career suicide, at the very least (Gottschall, 2012). Consequently, most storytellers and currently most writers of children's literature will mirror the norms and values that society prescribes, relaying and reinforcing the moral conventions that allow us to think that as long as we are like the good guys we will reap rewards and justice will be done to the villains of our world (Idem.). This is especially important when studying bedtime stories as children see the universe as a moral construction that contains a sense of inherent justice. A story that does not end with the victory of good over evil will simply be unsatisfactory to them, in essence necessitating the same types of story structures to be repeated throughout generations (Tucker, 1976). What is most important here is that moral education through bedtime stories is not only centuries old, but it also allows children to be introduced to society's and their parents' values in a safe and satisfactory way.

Conclusion

The evolutionary, cognitive, and moral lenses laid out in this literature review show together that they are each their own chapter of the same book. They are inherently intertwined as evolution has developed our cognition in certain ways to allow for the importance of storytelling, with one of its functions being the moral education of the people within a community. When looking at the phenomenon of bedtime stories I feel like it would be unwise to peel them apart and leave an angle or two behind. Combined they allow a researcher to dig deeper into questions like: Why do we tell stories to our children? What do the kids get out of this? And: How are these practices situated within a society? While they may not show the entire picture, the three lenses do allow us to see what might go on in the black box that is our mind during one of the most beloved traditions of parenting. The stories provide cognitive and social development and subconsciously prepare our children for the world they will enter when they crawl out from under their parents' wing. Not everything they learn will be beneficial though, as it took me about twenty years to discover that carrot cake was actually delicious.

Bibliography

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