Once Upon Our Future

How the stories we tell our children—especially early on—form the foundation of their emotional resilience, moral reasoning, and sense of possibility.

Before they learned to swipe, they learned to listen. And once, what they heard were long, winding stories that held.

A girl is caught in a storm and dropped into a strange land. She follows a road through fear, illusion, and unexpected friendship. Her journey is linear and mythic. Dorothy gets home not by solving the world but walking it-with loyalty, kindness, and courage.

Nearly a century later, another child steps onto a train platform and enters a world far less tidy. Harry Potter’s path is laced with grief, betrayal, and moral ambiguity. Teachers disappoint. Systems fail. Evil hides in plain sight. Over seven volumes, he doesn’t just finish a quest—he becomes someone who can absorb loss and still choose love.

The distance between Dorothy and Harry isn’t just historical. It reveals a cultural shift—from fable to psychological depth, from resolution to transformation. Our stories grew more complex because we realized children could carry more.

We’re raising kids in an age where facts are fluid, roles are blurred, and identity is increasingly shaped by what’s viral, not what’s vital.

At their best, stories do something more enduring than entertain. They form the deep structure of how a child understands struggle, builds memory, and organizes their sense of self.

They teach pacing, sequence, and emotional rhythm. They stretch a child’s memory and feelings across time, giving form to experiences still too complex to explain. They don’t declare their lessons—they become them.

Now, consider what many nine-year-olds encounter today as their first “story”: a three-second video. A jump cut. A punchline. Swipe. Another. And another. We’ve traded arcs for fragments, rhythm for novelty, and reflection for reaction.

What’s vanishing isn’t just attention. It’s the internal rhythm that makes identity coherent.

Because a story doesn’t simply entertain—it wires. Listening activates brain regions for empathy, memory, and imagination—including the Default Mode Network, where identity begins.

This is where coherence begins.

Story trains the mind to hold tension, to wait for resolution, to trust that feelings can evolve. This isn’t literary theory—it’s emotional survival.

We worry about attention spans, but the real crisis is more profound: children are losing the ability to narrate their own lives.
And when they can’t name what’s happening inside, they don’t just disconnect from others. They disappear from themselves.

And when story disappears, so does the structure that helps a child carry what they feel.

Scattered attention. Shallow recall. Emotion without context.

A child scrolls through thirty clips in ten minutes. Each jolts. None stays. Hours later, they cry—emotion without story.

The shape we took away was the one that holds emotion, memory, and meaning together.

What’s replaced story—TikTok, YouTube shorts, infinite scroll—is not evil. But it’s structurally different. It moves quickly, leaves no scaffolding, and builds nothing lasting. It trains the nervous system for reaction, not reflection.

We didn’t just lose long-form stories—we stopped believing children needed an inner world at all. We hand them stimulation and call it engagement. But stimulation without structure isn’t the story. It’s fragmentation.

The antidote isn’t banning screens. It’s restoring something older.

Fifteen minutes of reading aloud. A story from your own life told over dinner—without moral, just detail. A quiet question in the car: What speed was that—walk, trot, canter, or gallop?

Unicorns and ponies move in four speeds. So do children.

This metaphor becomes a gentle diagnosis. Was the day slow and steady like a walk? Chaotic joy like a gallop? Did something shift—a stumble, a burst of courage, a quiet win?

The point isn’t measurement. It’s memory.

Use playful metaphors or ask them to recall the shape of their day, not to extract insight but to help their minds practice shaping feelings into form.

Because before abstraction takes root, kids need structure that moves like play. Before identity forms, it rehearses.

That’s what stories do: emotional rehearsal. Characters fall, adapt, and rise. Through them, children practice how to lose and recover. Vulnerability and repair. They learn that struggle bends toward something. That arcs have turning points. That emotion isn’t just endured—it transforms.

Children raised on stories begin to develop narrative intuition. When something goes wrong, they pause. Is this the middle? The turn? The long night before it lifts?

They’ve felt this shape before. They’ve walked it in books. It walks in them now.

Dorothy gave us moral clarity, and Harry taught us how to handle contradictions. Both matter. But in today’s fractured world, Harry’s complexity may better equip our children for what they’ll face.

Because one day they’ll face something unchosen, and they’ll need a shape to move through it.

A child who can’t tell their own story becomes easy to sell to, easy to manipulate, and easy to lose to someone else’s script.

That’s why the bedtime story still matters. Not as nostalgia. As a blueprint.

Each time we read aloud, reflect beside them, or help them recall the shape of their day, we give them something stronger than advice. We give them a compass they’ll carry long after the book is closed.

We used to be the narrators. Now we’re expected to be curators. But children don’t need more choices—they need meaning.

Once upon a time still works.
We just have to return to it—again, and again—until one day, we notice: they’re the ones telling the story now.