Young Children's Emotional Attachments to Stories

Young Children’s Emotional Attachments to StoriesKristin J. Alexander, Sapient, Inc., Peggy J. Miller, University ofIllinois at Urbana-Champaign and Julie A. Hengst, University ofIllinois at Urbana-Champaign

Abstract

In the interest of developing a more holistic and integrated understanding of youngchildren’s experience of stories, this study describes preschoolers’ emotional attach-ments to stories and the cultural beliefs and practices which surround such attach-ments. Thirty-two European-American, middle-class families, participated in aninterview study of their children’s story attachments, and five of these mothers alsoparticipated in a short-term, longitudinal diary study. Every child experienced at leasttwo emotional attachments to stories. Children were captivated by stories presentedin different media, with many attachments occurring around video stories in additionto books. They expressed their attachments by repeatedly requesting the story, express-ing strong feelings, and enacting the story in pretend play. Story attachments weresocial in two fundamental ways: children created relationships with the characters intheir favorite stories, and story attachments emerged in the context of relationshipswith caregivers whose beliefs and practices supported such attachments.

Keywords: narrative; affect; folk theory; social relations

This paper is concerned with the social and affective dimension of young children’sexperience with stories and focuses specifically on children’s emotional attachmentsto stories. In this investigation we refer to a strong and sustained emotional involve-ment with a particular story as a ‘story attachment.’Although teachers, clinicians, andauthors of children’s literature take for granted that narratives inspire strong feelingsand that children become entranced by particular stories, this topic has been studiedvery little. Why should this be the case? We believe there are two primary reasons.First, the theoretical perspectives and assumptions guiding traditional studies of childdevelopment identify emotional and cognitive abilities as separate components ofdevelopment. Within this framework, most developmental work on early narrative hasbeen concerned primarily with what narrative can tell us about memory or other cog-nitive abilities. However important, this work has tended to eclipse other equallyimportant questions, questions that have to do with how children relate to stories in amore holistic sense. How do stories become personally meaningful to children? Why

© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Peggy J. Miller, Department of Psy-chology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 603 E. Daniel Street, Champaign, Illinois, 61820,USA.

Young Children’s Emotional Attachments to Stories 375

© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001 Social Development, 10, 3, 2001

do some stories, but not others, become important to them? How do children actuallyuse stories in their everyday lives? By describing children’s emotional attachments tostories and the caregiving practices that surround them, we hope to contribute to amore integrated understanding of young children’s experience of stories.

The second reason for the neglect of children’s emotional involvement with storiesstems, we believe, from the methodological difficulties that arise in studying emo-tional attachments to stories. A child suddenly becomes captivated by The Jungle Book and insists that his parents read it to him once, twice, three times a day for several weeks. He carries the book around with him and pretends to be Mowgli. Real-life emotional experiences like this cannot be studied in the laboratory. Nor are theyreadily accessible to naturalistic observation of the usual sort in which a researcherobserves the child at home for a brief, prearranged period of time. Not surprisingly,the most insightful studies of children’s attachments to stories are case histories con-ducted by researcher-parents, insiders with steady access to the child’s world. Thedrawback is that such studies have been limited to the offspring of academic parents.Thus, a critical contribution of the current study is the development and field testingof methods that allow us to expand our vision of story attachments beyond this selectgroup.

The current study was designed to address the gap in the literature concerning this remarkable phenomenon—story attachments. Specifically, the goals of this study were (1) to collect basic descriptive information about preschoolers’ affective attachments to stories and (2) to identify caregivers’ beliefs and practices concerningstory attachments. Theoretically, we ground our work in sociohistoric and practicetheory perspectives. In order to meet the methodological challenge outlined above, the study combines in-depth interviews with parents and diary-records of children’s story attachments as they unfold day-by-day. We hope to demonstrate the viability of this combined strategy for studying young children’s emotional attachments tostories.

Research on Young Children’s Stories

From a disciplinary perspective, ‘story attachments’ is a homeless phenomenon(Goodnow, 1995). Although aspects of story attachment have been taken up by severalfields of study, story attachments, as a phenomenon in its own right, is not fullyaddressed by any discipline. Therefore, in this section, we briefly survey work bydevelopmental and educational psychologists, clinicians, and scholars of children’s literature, as well as case studies conducted by parent-researchers from various disci-plines in order to review current insights related to story attachments.

Developmental and Educational Research

There is a large and growing literature on young children’s narrative development. Onestrand of research has addressed the developmental origins of conversational narra-tive (e.g., Eisenberg, l985; Fivush & Fromhoff, 1988; Miller & Sperry, 1988; Nelson,1993), revealing that children as young as two years of age are able to recount pastexperiences in interaction with others. A few studies have examined the affectivedimensions of early narratives, including the emotional content of stories (Fivush,1993; Miller & Sperry, 1988; Peterson & McCabe, 1983; Pitcher & Prelinger, 1963)and devices for evaluating or conveying the point of stories (Miller & Sperry, 1988;

376 Kristin J. Alexander, Peggy J. Miller and Julie A. Hengst


Peterson & McCabe, 1983). Another strand of research has focused on oral ‘bookread-ing’ as a context for the acquisition of specific lexical, pragmatic, narrative, and literacy skills (e.g., Bruner, 1983; Heath, Branscombe, & Thomas, 1986; Snow &Goldfield, 1983; Snow & Ninio, 1986; Sulzby, 1985). Snow and Ninio (1986) acknowl-edged that this approach is limited in that it does not address the fact that ‘books area source of enchantment and wonder’ (p. 121). However, the work on narrative devel-opment that is most relevant to story attachments are those rare studies that addressthe affective functions that stories serve for young children in the context of theireveryday lives. In addition to cognitive and linguistic development, Engel (1995), forexample, emphasizes that children use stories to make emotional sense of themselvesand others; she notes that when children retell stories again and again, they gainmastery both of the original experience and of the telling itself. Bruner and Lucariello,Feldman, and Watson in Nelson’s (1989) Narratives from the Crib describe how one2-year-old used stories to think through problems and re-integrate distressing pastexperiences. Such emotional and problem-solving uses of stories appear to be pre-cursors of the heuristic and therapeutic uses of narratives by adults (Ochs, Smith, &Taylor, 1989; Spence, 1982).

Clinical Research

Connections between narrative and emotional development are also made in the clini-cal literature. A common assumption clinically is that stories help children cope withthe ordinary stressful experiences of childhood (e.g., birth of a sibling, going to schoolfor the first time, moving to a new neighborhood). The best known articulation of this position is Bettelheim’s (1977) book, The Uses of Enchantment. He argued thatchildren become enthralled with fairy tales that represent their current emotional con-cerns and use the tales to find solutions to their inner conflicts. Other clinical studiesrest on the assumption that stories can be used therapeutically with children who have suffered abuse or other traumatic experiences (e.g., Berg-Cross & Berg-Cross,1976, Kleckner & Engel, 1988; Pardeck, 1990; Stiles & Kottman, 1990; Strizinger,1983), and specific therapeutic interventions have been developed for this purpose(e.g., mutual storytelling technique, Gardner, 1971; and bibliotherapy, Shrodes, 1950).For example, Miller and Boe (1990) conducted a study with members of a hospital staff to examine the use of storytelling in the treatment of psychic trauma. As a part ofthe treatment program they built up a library of relevant stories for the children, alibrary that evolved through a review of the children’s histories followed by a listing of themes (e.g., aggression, abuse, fear, nightmares, separation, and abandonment).With consultation from experts, bookstores, and libraries, stories from children’s literature and folk tales were matched to themes reflecting the children’s psychologicalneeds. The clinicians argued that children picked stories that matched their psycho-logical situation when given free choice, a point that Bettelheim (1977) also stressed. They noted that the stories were so important to the children that they became transi-tional objects. Specifically, children invested stories with the feelings that were attachedto an important loved one which allowed the stories to provide comfort for the childrenin the absence of the caregiver for whom the object was a stand-in. They reported that the children frequently took their favorite books to bed with them. One boy, givenhis favorite book inscribed by his regular staff upon discharge, was returned to the unit eight months later due to a crisis in his family, and arrived clutching the same well-worn book.



Children’s Literature Research

Scholars of children’s literature take for granted that children form attachments to par-ticular stories and that children use stories for affective purposes. While psychologistshave focused exclusively on the psychological content of stories, scholars of children’sliterature remind us that the aesthetic properties of the story cannot be separated fromthe content of the story. Indeed, it is often the child’s attraction to the aesthetic prop-erties of the story—the aural and visual rhythmic patterns, the characters who inviteidentification and empathy—that inspires his or her emotional attachment to the story(Hearne, 1992).

A closely related idea, and one that echoes a theme that emerged from the clinicalliterature, is that children become emotionally attached to stories that match theircurrent psychological concerns. Tucker (1981) argues that if the plot is near enoughto children’s most terrifying fantasies or nightmares, it may become of ‘great, evensometimes compulsive interest for them; truly, a story that may be demanded over andover again’ (p. 64). Also mentioned repeatedly in this literature is the idea that chil-dren use stories to achieve catharsis. Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild ThingsAre (quoted in Lanes, 1980) argues that while it is important to protect children from ‘new and painful experiences that are beyond their emotional comprehension,’(p. 107), it is equally important to recognize that

from their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions, that fearand anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, that they continually cope withfrustration as best they can. And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It isthe best means they have for taming the Wild Things. (p. 107)

The view expressed by Sendak is compatible with a line of research in children’sliterature inspired by Reader Response Theory. This work is relevant to the currentstudy in its focus on children’s active role in creating meaning from texts. Rosenblatt(1938/1976, 1978) the originator of Reader Response Theory, argued that a text ismerely words on the page; the reader’s infusion of meaning into that text creates thestory. This insight created a shift in literary theory from a focus on meaning in thetext to a recognition that the reader brought something important to the experience ofreading. In this framework, the reader and the text interact to shape the story (Iser,1974; 1978).

Most studies undertaken from this perspective that have examined children’sresponses to books have focused on what their responses can tell us about the reader’slevel of cognitive development and how that level influences the creation of the story(e.g., Applebee, 1978; Galda, 1982). Trousdale (1989) focused instead on the affec-tive meanings that young readers generate. By describing how three eight-year-oldgirls actually responded to two pre-selected fairy tales, he showed that the childrenbrought their life experiences, concerns, and inner needs to the task of making theirown personal meaning of the tales. For example, ‘they selected and emphasized ele-ments in the tales which seemed to have personal significance for them and ignoredor deleted elements which apparently had little significance for them, or were painfulto them’ (Trousdale, 1989, p. 38). Trousdale also analyzed the children’s repeatedretellings of the story and showed that they responded in a variety of ways to the samestory. As Yolen (1977) and Bettelheim (1977) suggested, the girls in the study usedelements in the tales to objectify inner conflicts, but those conflicts were highly indi-vidualized and shifted over time.



Spitz (1999) offers a more complex and social view of the power of children’s lit-erature. Focusing on the enduring qualities of popular picture books, she argues thatchildren particularly are susceptible to the powerful poetic and visual images of well-crafted books. Particular images can stay with individuals for years, often bringingthem back to their special books time and time again throughout their lives—carry-ing special picture books off to college and engaging in conversations with strangersabout favorite characters. Spitz also pushes beyond the view of the isolated book andreader, pointing instead to the cultural practices of adults reading with children.Reading-out-loud is seen by most participants as an enjoyable time which enhancessocial relationships. However, Spitz also argues that picture books are cultural objects,carrying images that can both sustain and challenge cultural values. Reading picturebooks provides children with early and sometimes first experiences with attitudes sur-rounding race and gender, obedience and disobedience, and death, loss, and separa-tion. Through their shared experiences of these story worlds, children and adults alike can explore cultural expectations and ‘engage in the task of cultural transmis-sion’ (p. 215).

Case Studies of Young Children’s Emotional Involvement with Stories

In-depth case studies of children’s experience with stories, conducted by parents orother family members, date from the 1950’s. For example, Dorothy White (1954) con-ducted a longitudinal study of her daughter’s interactions with books from her secondbirthday until just prior to her entry into school. Butler (1975) studied her severelyhandicapped granddaughter’s involvement with literature, describing how her care-givers developed a book-based compensatory program for Cushla. The study revealsthe remarkable cognitive gains and important affective benefits that Cushla experi-enced. Crago and Crago (1983) documented their daughter’s interactions with booksbetween the ages of three and five. They noted that Anna often adopted theheroine/victim role and reserved the aggressor/antagonist role to the parent—‘some-times with elaborate safeguards to distance that character from herself ’ (p. 106).

The most extensive record available of children’s affective involvement with storiesis Wolf and Heath’s (1992) nine-year study of Wolf’s two daughters. Growing up withparents who loved literature, these children were ushered into the delights of bookread-ing virtually from birth. Their passionate engagement with stories was already evidentin the early years as they made repeated forays into some books while disdaining others.The study powerfully demonstrates that the experience of interacting with written textswas a social-cognitive-affective experience from its inception, inextricably linked to thechild’s emotional growth. It also demonstrates that children’s meaning-making activi-ties carried them far from the act of reading to pretend play, discussion, and other waysof making links among multiple texts and to their own lives.

These findings are supported by Miller et al. (1993) in which Miller’s son’s intenseattachment to ‘The Tale of Peter Rabbit’ by Beatrix Potter was described. During afour-week period from 23–24 months of age, this child made repeated requests to readthe story and repeatedly retold the story apart from the bookreading context. Micro-level discourse analysis of how the retellings changed over time revealed that he suc-cessfully appropriated and resolved conflicts posed by the written story, conflicts thatparalleled concurrent experiences in his life. While retaining many elements of thestory, he systematically transformed its plot, restoring harmony among the charactersand canonical order to his world.



In sum, the picture that emerges from these diverse studies is one of story attach-ments as a phenomenon that is truly at the nexus of multiple lines of development—cognitive/linguistic, emotional, and social/cultural. Story attachments are grounded inmultiple worlds—crossing the daily experiences of the child, the world of the narra-tive, and the family of practices around story reading and telling. In order to betterunderstand this phenomenon, then, it is critical to approach it from a theoretical perspective that preserves the inherently complex and social nature of story attachments.

Story Attachments as Social Practice

In this study, we take up a theoretical perspective that foregrounds story attachmentsas social practice, looking not only to the children’s engagement with stories but alsoto parental beliefs and practices. We believe that children’s emotional attachments tostories can best be understood within a discourse practices theory of childhood social-ization (Miller et al., 1990, 1992; Miller et al., 1993; Miller 1994; Miller, Fung, &Mintz, 1996). Borrowing heavily from Vygotksy’s (1987) theory of mediated actionand from practice theories of language and social life (Bauman, 1986; Bourdieu,1990), this model posits that family life is embedded in recurring activities and mediated by particular discourse practices, and that young children come to orientthemselves within systems of meaning by participating in these everyday social practices.

A key implication of this model is that story attachments cannot be understood bystudying the child alone. This theory, like Spitz (1999), acknowledges the interrelatedcontributions of children and caregivers as joint participants in the meaning-makingprocess. Caregivers intentionally and unintentionally structure children’s access to cul-tural texts and interpret their meanings for them. For example, they purchase booksand videos for children, allow children to choose which stories to interact with, andencourage children’s repeated engagements with their favorite stories. These and otherparental practices make it possible for children to form story attachments. Moreover,these practices are informed and justified by parents’ folk or commonsense theories(Bruner, 1990), also called ethnotheories (Harkness & Super, 1996), about stories andtheir role in the emotional life of children. At the same time, this model emphasizesthat children actively engage with the texts that caregiviers make available to them.For example, they identify with certain story characters. Thus, this model of social-ization allows us to see that story attachments are social in two fundamental ways:children create relationships with the characters in their favorite stories, and storyattachments emerge in the context of relationships with caregivers whose beliefs andpractices support these meaning-making endeavors.

Methods

This study was designed to describe and trace children’s attachments to stories froma variety of sources: books, videos, stories of personal experience (e.g., mother tellsa story about the death of the child’s grandmother), and make-believe stories (e.g.,father invents a story with make-believe characters and tells it to the child at bedtime).The study was conducted in two phases. In the initial parental interview phase, thirty-two mothers were interviewed concerning their children’s emotional involvement withstories, allowing researchers to collect basic descriptive information. This method was



chosen following pilot work showing that mothers were both able and willing to talkabout and reflect on their children’s emotional involvement with stories

The diary-observation phase allowed us to explore in more detail the ways in whichchildren and caregivers actually interact with narrative texts through close-up docu-mentation of the natural history of ongoing story attachments. Six parents from theinterview phase were trained to observe and keep detailed diary records of their chil-dren’s story attachments. This approach is compatible with approaches adopted by anumber of researchers who have attempted to capture naturally occurring emotionalexperience by enlisting mothers to collect data (e.g., Goodenough, 1931; Zahn-Waxlerand Radke-Yarrow, 1982). Bretherton and Beeghly (1982) note that when the targetbehaviors are infrequent, a parent has a far greater chance of observing them than doesa visiting researcher. Indeed, as key ‘insiders,’ primary caregivers are in a privilegedposition to capture attachments as they spontaneously emerge.

Participants

Thirty-two families with preschool aged children participated in the interview phaseof the study. They were selected from a subject file at a large mid-western university.Families were European-American and in all but one case were two-parent households.All but four of the parents had at least two years of college, including two of themothers who had advanced degrees and held academic positions. Each family had atleast one child who was either 2, 3, 4, or 5 years old and could serve as the focal childfor this study. Across the thirty-two families, there were eight focal children (four boysand four girls) in each of the four age groups. When contacted, all thirty-two familiesagreed to participate in the interview phase of the study. Although the families weregiven the choice of mother, father, or both acting as the informant for their child’sstory attachments, in all thirty-two cases the mothers chose to be interviewed.

For the diary-observation phase of the study, six of the original thirty-two motherswere contacted by phone and all agreed to participate. These mothers were chosenbecause they had shown interest in the topic, seemed likely to have the time to par-ticipate, and had good rapport with the researcher. These six mothers were each offered$100 a month (up to two months) for their participation. Only one mother was unableto keep diary records for at least a month, and so was dropped from the study. Thefocal children for the remaining five families included three girls and two boys: Emily(3;7 years old), Chelsia (2;7), Isabelle (3;2), Trevor (3;8), and Jeffrey (2;11). (Partici-pants’ names were changed to protect their identities.)

Procedures

The Interview: Each mother was interviewed in her home. The interview was semi-structured and audio-recorded. Most lasted about two hours. The researcher also madefield notes during the visit concerning the availability of books, video tapes, and otherrelevant resources that were evident from the physical ecology of the home (e.g.,Heath, 1982; Van Peer, 1991).

The interviewer began by explaining her interest in the child’s experiences with allsorts of stories, explaining that she was especially interested in the stories that thechild had displayed most interest in or emotional attachment to, and asking if the focalchild had ever had a special story, one that s/he was very, very interested in or attachedto. The goal was to allow the mother to make her own selection of relevant stories and



to encourage her to describe in her own words her child’s past and current story attach-ments. The interviewer guided each mother through three sets of questions: (1) familynarrative practices, specifically, what story genres (e.g., written, video, stories ofparent’s or child’s personal experience, make-believe stories) did the family engagein? For example, How often do you read to him/her? How many books per day? When do you read? Where do you read?; (2) basic descriptive information about the child’s story attachments, including What was the title/what was the story about? How long did the attachment last? How did you know that s/he was inter-ested/involved in the story? How did s/he express the attachment (e.g., listeningintently, retelling, enacting in pretend play)?; and (3) mothers’ beliefs and practices,including, Why do you think your child is attached to that particular story? What wereyour reactions to the repetitions? Would you say that you encouraged or discouragedthe repetitions?

Diaries: Following the recommendations of Zahn-Waxler and Radke-Yarrow(1982), the five mother-collaborators were trained as research assistants assigned tocollect observations on their children. Initial training was conducted in two 3-hoursessions in the home. The mothers were given a written diary (see Appendix A) whichimposed specificity and focus but also allowed space for caregivers to interpret andcontextualize the events. Mothers were given written instructions at the first homevisit, and the researcher demonstrated how to fill out the diary by actually making anentry of the child engaging with his or her special story. In addition, written instruc-tions were appended to the diary for the mothers to refer to as necessary. These instruc-tions stressed the importance of making an entry in the diary each time that the childengaged with his or her special story, either during the engagement or as soon as pos-sible after the engagement.

To assess the reliability of mothers’ observations, mother and researcher made inde-pendent diary entries of the child’s engagement with his or her special story on twoseparate occasions. For diary items 1 through 5, percentage of agreement ranged from.80 to .90 for the first reliability test and .90 to .95 for the second. Disagreements wereresolved through discussion. Because items 6 through 9 were interpretive items (e.g.,How did you feel about this episode? Is there anything about this episode that reallystands out to you?), inter-coder reliability estimates were not computed; instead theresearcher made sure that the mother provided complete and detailed responses. Inorder to ensure the continued accuracy and completeness of the diary records, theresearcher visited the mothers four times per week at first and then visits tapered offto once a week by the third week of the study. The researcher also phoned mothersperiodically to monitor their record keeping and to answer questions.

The mother-collaborators were asked to observe and make diary entries for aminimum of two months. Although all the mothers provided adequate documentation,they varied considerably in the frequency of and detail in their diary entries. Chelsia’sdiary was the least detailed, with a total of 15 entries over about 10 weeks (an averageof 1.5 entries/week). Isabelle’s diary, though not the longest, was the most detailed,with 30 entries over almost 4 weeks (average of 7.5 entries/week) with frequent com-mentary beyond the information requested on the diary form. Jeffrey’s diary had 88 entries over 21 weeks (4.2/week); Emily’s diary had 91 entries over 24 weeks(3.8/week); and, Trevor’s diary had 44 entries over 24 weeks (1.8/week). The threemothers who kept diaries beyond two months, did so without pay because they foundthe data collection interesting and personally useful. Thus, during this phase of thestudy observational data on evolving story attachments was collected across a range



of one to six months per participant, and for a total of 20.5 months for all five par-ticipants combined.

Data Analysis

The data from the two phases of this study were coded, and are reported, separately.The audio-tapes of the interviews were transcribed verbatim. ‘Hypercard’, a programfor the Macintosh, was adapted to fit the interview questions and was used to struc-ture and simplify the coding of the interviews. The interview responses to questionsconcerning the family narrative practices were coded and tallied based on the fre-quency of the focal child’s participation in four different categories—reading booksout loud; watching videos; telling stories of personal experience (oral stories ofparent’s, child’s, or other family member’s past experiences); and telling make-believestories (i.e., oral stories invented by the parent that involved make-believe characters).The length of each attachment and number of these attachments that were current atthe time of the interview were also noted. The current story attachments were thenpulled out for more detailed analysis. Each current attachment was coded for its basicdescriptive characteristics and for the mother’s response to the attachment. The finalcategories used for coding the story attachments were derived both from the pre-setinterview questions and from categories derived through successive passes throughthe interview data (Gaskins, Miller, & Corsaro, 1993). Codes for family narrative prac-tices are listed in Table 1. Codes for basic descriptive characteristics are listed in Table2 for types of stories and in Table 3 for expressions of attachment; stories were alsocoded + or - classic plot structure. Codes for mother’s response to the attachment arelisted in Table 4; their responses were also coded as to what they thought the reasonswere for the attachment (ritual of storytelling, nonverbal aesthetic properties, childliked character, child was similar to the character, parallel between child’s experiencesand events in the story, story helped manage child’s concerns, liked triumph of goodover evil, protagonist has power). These codes are defined and exemplified in theresults section.

The first author and two trained assistants completed all interview coding. The assis-tants were trained on pilot interviews and the consistency and accuracy of their workwas checked repeatedly during the coding. Inter-coder reliability estimates wereobtained by comparing the independent coding of six randomly chosen interviews;percentage of agreement was high, ranging from .95 to 1.00 across the six interviews.Disagreements were resolved through discussion.

The written diary entries were counted and reviewed, and the total numbers of narratives reported were tabulated. Then, repeated themes or narrative interests wereidentified. For example, entries about watching Land Before Time, playing with toydinosaurs, and calling a brother ‘Little Foot,’ would all be coded under the same theme:dinosaurs. Themes or interests that were repeated were pulled out for further analy-sis. Finally, of these sustained themes, story attachments were identified based on theecriteria: (1) the child showed strong interest or emotional involvement with the story;(2) the involvement lasted for at least two weeks; (3) the mother provided at least fourentries concerning the attachment. The third criterion excluded from analysis poten-tial attachments that were not adequately documented. Each story attachment wascoded using the basic descriptive characteristics and the mother’s response to theattachment, categories developed in the interview phase of the study. In addition toidentifying and coding story attachments in this global manner, the day-by-day docu-



mentation of the diaries allowed us to trace the ‘natural history’ of each of the reportedstory attachments, including changes in both the child’s engagement with the story and the mother’s responses during the course of the story attachment. It isthrough these case studies, then, that we are able to present a view of evolving storyattachments.

Results

The combined methods in the study (interview and diary-observation) utilizing parentsas informants and collaborators was highly successful, yielding a wealth of data about the nature of children’s story attachments. Clearly, their children’s emotionalattachments to particular stories was a topic that these mothers were able, willing, and even eager to discuss. Early in the interviews, mothers often anticipated issuesthat were addressed later in the interview (e.g., duration of attachments, expressionsof attachments) and volunteered detailed information. The following data exceptsillustrate the fluency with which these mothers discussed their children’s story attachments.

—‘It’s called The Napping House. She’s been wanting this book every night, sometimesduring the daytime too. She keeps requesting it. Now, I think she can almost recite thestory. She’s real intense about it. If I skip a word, she gets really mad.’ (Interview withmother of a 2-year-old)

—‘His first major attachment to any story was “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.” That was hisfirst BIG major attachment. We went through I would say a good solid six months ofeveryday watching that movie . . . At one point he would finish watching it and say, “CouldI watch it again?” He would scream, “Again!” when the movie ended. . . .’ (Interview withmother of a 3-year-old)

During the interview phase of the study, all mothers reported on both past andcurrent emotional attachments to stories. These attachments were relatively frequent,often of long duration, and most notably were often reported as highly memorableexperiences in these families’ lives. The mothers reported 2 to 8 attachments per child,for a total of 128 attachments and a mean and median of 5 attachments per child. Theduration of attachments ranged from 3 weeks to 4 years, with a mean of 1 year, 10months and a median of 1 year, 6 months. The majority (.75) of mothers described atleast one attachment that lasted for a year or more. Mothers often explicitly describedtheir children’s attachments to stories as intense or obsessive (e.g., ‘you couldn’t avoidit,’ ‘wanted to watch it 24 hours a day,’ ‘it got out of hand,’ ‘she went out of her mindabout it’). A mother of a 4 year old said, ‘One weekend she would not come homefrom school, and they [the teachers] said, “Why don’t you take the Barney tape?” Well,that was the end of the end. She played the Barney tape every single hour that she wasawake the entire weekend. And if we tried to turn it off, she’d be screaming, yelling,crying.’There was no discernable pattern with respect to the frequency of attachmentsat different ages: 25 were reported for 2 year olds, 24 for 3 year olds, 29 for 4 yearolds, and 19 for 5 year olds. The majority of attachments the mothers reported on (.76,N = 97) were currently ongoing.

These families reported rich patterns of narrative practices centering mostly aroundvideos and books. More than .80 of the mothers reported that their children watchedvideos and listened to books read to them on a daily basis (see Table 1). All mothersreported that stories of personal experience were told in their families but only half indicated that it was a daily practice. The least frequent narrative practice was



telling make-believe stories (i.e., oral stories invented by the parent or the parent andchild together), with the majority of mothers indicating that this practice neveroccurred.

The robustness of family practices involving written stories and video stories is con-sistent with field notes taken by the interviewer: quantities of children’s books werevisible in all the families, and all but one of the families owned a VCR. Most of themothers reported that they took their children to the library regularly to check outbooks, that their children owned video tapes and/or were allowed to rent tapes regu-larly, and that their bedtime routine included bookreading. Several of the mothers indi-cated that they set limits on the amount of time they allowed their young children towatch video tapes; no one said that she limited her children’s exposure to books. Themajority of mothers indicated that they allowed their children to choose which storywould be read, told, or watched. Many also said that they tried to provide their chil-dren with a variety of stories.

Interview Responses—Basic Descriptive Information on Current Story Attachments

The remaining analyses are based on the mothers’ reports of story attachments whichwere current at the time of the interview (N = 97). Analyses by type of story revealedthat attachments to written and video stories predominated. As can be see in Table 2,this pattern applied both to the proportion of mothers (N = 32) who reported at leastone attachment of a given type and to the proportion of total attachments (N = 97)falling into a given type. In addition, this pattern applied to each age group. It is inter-esting to note that the frequency of children’s attachments by type of story directlyparallels the frequency of family practices by type of story, with written stories andvideo stories predominating in both cases.

In response to questions regarding the content of the story, mothers tended to simplyrecount what happened in the story. Of the 97 current attachments, .44 were to Disneystories (books or videos). All but one of the stories had a classic plot structure involv-ing a conflict or departure from the canonical, which was subsequently resolved, cul-minating in a happy ending. In the majority of stories (.69) the protagonist faced athreatened or actual separation from his or her family (e.g., Beauty and the Beast,Bambi, The Little Mermaid, a personal experience story about divorce).

Table 1. Family Narrative Practices by Type of Practice and Frequency: Propor-tion of Subjects

Type of practice

Telling stories TellingReading books Watching of personal make-believe

Frequency out loud video stories experience stories

Daily .84 .81 .47 .06Weekly .16 .13 .28 .06Sometimes .00 .03 .25 .13Never .00 .03 .00 .75



Mothers reported that the focal children expressed their attachments to stories inmultiple ways. As can be seen in Table 3, this finding applied both to the proportionof mothers who reported at least one type of expression and to the proportion of totalstory attachments that evoked a given type of expression. Each of the mothers reportedthat her child requested the story and listened or looked intently to the story. Othervery frequent ways of expressing attachments were expressing feelings while inter-acting with the story, asking questions about the story, discussing the story when notwatching/listening to it, and memorizing the story. One mother explained how sheknew her child had memorized the story, ‘He knew it inside out, backwards and for-wards. He could do the dances with Danny Kaye and Dick van Dyke. . . . He would

Table 2. Children’s Attachments by Type of Story and Age of Child: Presentedas Proportion of Subjects and Proportion of Attachments (in parentheses)

Type of Story

Age Written Video Personal experience Make-believe

2yrs. 1.0 (.44) .88 (.36) .50 (.20) .00 (.00)3yrs. .88 (.38) .88 (.33) .50 (.21) .25 (.08)4yrs. .75 (.24) .63 (.28) .63 (.31) .25 (.17)5yrs. .50 (.26) .63 (.32) .63 (.37) .13 (.05)

Overall .78 (.33) .75 (.32) .56 (.27) .16 (.08)

Note: Proportion of subjects were calculated using the number of subjects in each age groupas the denominator (N = 8). Proportion of attachments were calculated using the total numberof attachments per age group as the denominator (2yrs. = 25; 3yrs. = 24; 4yrs. = 29; 5yrs. = 19;Total = 97).

Table 3. Children’s Expression of Story Attachments:Proportion of Subjects and Proportion of Attachments

Proportion of Proportion ofType of expression subjects attachments

Request story 1.0 .93Listen/look intently 1.0 .85Express feelings .94 .85Ask questions .91 .81Discuss/talk about .88 .77Memorize .88 .72Pretend/act out .75 .63Retell .69 .52Sleep with book/video .53 .48Carry book/video about .38 .40Dream about .16 .10



tell the lines before it even got started, he would say them.’ Another mother said, ‘Aslong as it’s the same story she’s okay, but if I try to alter a word, she knows that’s notin the story, and she gets mad.’

The majority of the children were reported to pretend or act out the stories that theywere attached to. (Note that children could pretend or act out any type of story, whetherit be written, video, personal experience, or make-believe. In other words, this type ofexpression of attachment is not limited to make-believe stories.) One mother said, ‘Ithink he likes to pretend he’s Sharptooth, the bigger monster you know, the one that’schasing the smaller ones and growling and you know, this kind of thing. Cause he’llrun around the house growling and I’ll say “who are you or what are you doing orsomething?” and he goes “I’M SHARPTOOTH!!” You know “grrrr” and this kind ofthing.’A 5-year-old girl wanted to wear only her pink denim dress everyday for a year,‘because it was her Cinderella dress! I remember the day she saw it hanging in hercloset for the first time, her eyes lit up like she had seen Jesus . . . she screamed,“ahhhh, it’s my ball gown!” ’ Another girl tried to look like the Little Mermaid, ‘Themermaid has long hair, and she won’t let me cut her hair. And she likes to wear herhair down, which the mermaid wears hers down.’ The majority of the children alsoretold their special stories. About half of the children slept with their special books orvideos or carried them about. The least frequently reported form of expression wasdreaming about the story.

There was remarkable stability in expressions of attachment across the age groups,whether proportions were computed in terms of number of mothers who reported atleast one type of expression or in terms of frequency of attachments falling into agiven form of expression. Upon visual inspection of these data, the most strikingexception to this stability occurred for retellings, which increased in frequency acrossthe age groups. Figures for proportion of attachments were .31 for 2 year olds, .47 for3 year olds, .59 for 4 year olds, and .69 for 5 year olds. Figures for proportions ofsubjects were .38 for 2 year olds, .63 for 3 year olds, .75 for 4 year olds, and 1.00 for5 year olds. All of the four and five year olds were reported to have memorized at leastone of their special stories, compared with .84 for 2 year olds and .69 for 3 year olds.Of the two and three year olds, .69 were reported to have slept with at least one oftheir special books and videos, compared with .50 for 4 and 5 year olds.

Interview Response—Mothers’ Beliefs and Practices about Current Story Attachments

The mothers easily expressed reasons for story attachments, discussing, often atlength, the way that story attachments contributed to the emotional well-being of theirchildren. Regardless of the focal child’s age, these mothers frequently mentioned char-acteristics of the story itself that they thought were appealing or emotionally salientto the child. Every mother expressed the opinion that the child was attached to thestory because he or she liked the character and because the child was similar to thecharacter. In addition, most of the mothers cited a parallel between the child’s expe-rience and the events in the story. For example, one mother reported that she tried tofind books that reflected her child’s concerns, including fear of the dark and the birthof a baby sister. Another mother said, ‘She loved to hear A Sitter for Baby Monsterwhen I started my job and she was going to have a new baby-sitter for a while. Thethings that happen in the story are just like at our house. The mom goes to work andthey play and then they clean up and then they eat lunch and then they take naps and



I think it’s just very . . . she can relate to that one real well, even though it’s a monster.’The majority of mothers also said that stories help the child to manage his or her emo-tional concerns and many also mentioned the child’s vicarious pleasure in the protag-onist’s power and in the triumph of good over evil. In addition to these characteristicsassociated with the story itself, the mothers also listed characteristics of the ritual ofstorytelling that her child found appealing, such as one-on-one attention, calmingeffects of a familiar experience, as well as nonverbal aesthetic properties (e.g., themusic accompanying the video stories, rhymes, ‘windows’ to open in some of thewritten stories).

Mothers did not simply list reasons for their children’s attachments but rather wovevarious elements together forming a powerful folk-theory or ethnotheory about therole of story attachments in children’s development. The children, as they describedthem, are drawn to stories that display parallels with their own experiences and thenuse those parallels to manage their developing emotions. These connections betweenreal life and narrative provide a basis upon which the child can personalize the story,identify with the characters, and use the story to help manage emotional concerns. Infact, many mothers reported that both they and their children actively seek out suchstories. One mother said,

I think she identifies with characters in Napping House cause, especially with this book,it’s like her own personal experience. Well, it has a cat and a dog, that she can relate tobecause we have a cat and a dog like the ones in the book. And it has a granny and shehas two grandmothers and she has visited them both every summer. We have pictures ofour parents around the house and she sees them and talks to them regularly on the tele-phone. So yeah, and they live in a house, like ours so they’re things she can relate to innormal circumstances. So for some short period of time, she can sort of create a littleworld and a safe feeling through the book. It’s reliable when you’re upset or when youwant some attention from mommy and daddy, ‘let’s read Napping House.’

Many mothers commented that story attachments such as these helped to relax thechild. However, this mother provides an excellent example of how her daughter usedher special book to manipulate her own emotional states.

Mothers also sounded the converse theme, noting that their children attended to newor different experiences or emotions presented in stories. Children would identify withthe protagonist’s emotions, ‘I think it’s just part of his growing imagination, it kindahelps him put himself into different situations without having to go through the expe-rience actually. He can just kind of imagine what it would be like and it’s a safe wayto do that.’ Two mothers, whose children were attached to the video story of ‘Bambi,’reported that their children cried out with the same urgency every time they saw thehunters kill Bambi’s mother. Another mother said that her child attempted to cry everytime she retold the story of her grandmother’s death, an event that happened beforethe child was born. Still another mother said, ‘We taped that episode so that she couldwatch it whenever she wanted. I thought it was a little strange that she wanted us totape the episode that made her cry but she likes to cry along with them, that’s why Ithink she definitely puts herself in that spot.’ Mothers also reported that their childrenopenly worked to ignore parts of the story that were too disturbing. One mother, forexample, reported how impressed she was with her two-year-old’s ability to fastforward the videotape through the parts that were too scary for him.

Not surprisingly, in light of the mothers’ beliefs about the value of favorite storiesin their children’s overall development, the mothers’ also said that they encouragedthe majority of the stories (.62) their children were attached to (see Table 4). In addi-



tion, although the majority of mothers at each age reported that they encouragedattachments, mothers of older children were less likely to encourage and more likelyto discourage their children’s attachments. Only one mother discouraged her child’sattachment to a written story. One mother stated, ‘If it gets her interested in readingand in books, I’m happy.’ Although some attachments to video stories were discour-aged, the majority of mothers (.71) said that they took advantage of their children’sattachments to video stories to get their own chores done.

Despite the high degree of encouragement of story attachments, the sheer repeti-tiveness of prolonged attachments eventually led many mothers to become frustratedor bored at the prospect of reading, telling, or hearing about the same story yet again.The majority of mothers (.80) expressed mixed and changing feelings about their chil-dren’s attachments to stories (e.g., ‘Well, I’ve heard about Cinderella almost everydayfor over a year, and I’ve had to read the bloody story as often as I could stomach it . . . and maybe a little more. I just couldn’t do it anymore!!’). After her daughterwatched the same video story three times a day for six months, a mother decided that‘it had gotten out of hand’ and began to limit her daughter’s access to the tape. Halfof the mothers resorted to hiding the now offending books and videos. One mothersaid she sometimes simply refused to retell personal experience stories to her child(e.g., ‘It drives me crazy, I hate repeating’). In other words, although the mothersreported encouraging story attachments, there were two qualifications to their support:they found themselves tiring of prolonged attachments, and they were somewhat lesstolerant of story attachments in older children.

Diary-Observation Responses—Case Studies of Evolving Story Attachments

The diaries kept on Emily, Chelsia, Isabelle, Trevor, and Jeffrey allowed us to lookbeyond the mothers’ recollections of story attachments to their recorded observationsof the day-to-day behaviors of their children’s evolving attachments and their own

Table 4. Encouragement of Story Attachments: Pre-sented as Proportion of Subjects and Proportion ofAttachments (in parentheses)

Degree of encouragement

Age Encourage Discourage Neither

2yrs. 1.0 (.80) .00 (.04) .25 (.16)3yrs. 1.0 (.63) .13 (.12) .25 (.25)4yrs. 1.0 (.52) .25 (.21) .38 (.27)5yrs. 1.0 (.53) .50 (.26) .38 (.21)

Overall 1.0 (.62) .22 (.15) .31 (.23)

Note: Proportion of subjects were calculated using the numberof subjects in each age group as the denominator (N = 8). Pro-portion of attachments were calculated using the total numberof attachments per age group as the denominator (2yrs. = 25; 3yrs. = 24; 4yrs. = 29; 5yrs. = 19; Total = 97).



shifting responses. Across all five cases 125 narrative interests were documented inthe diaries, but only 24 of these were repeated in more than one diary entry. Many of these repeated narrative interests, however, were not sustained long enough (aminimum of two weeks) or were not well enough documented (a minimum of fourentries) to meet our definition of a ‘story attachment’ for this phase of the study. There-fore, across all five children only 15 story attachments were identified, ranging from1 to 6 story attachments per child. In contrast to the parental reports obtained in theinterview data, the diary data display story attachments as extremely complex anddynamic. While the recall protocol of the interview phase of this study was able toforeground the recognizable and remarkable homogeneity of story attachments, theongoing observation protocol of the diary phase foregrounds the endemic intertextu-ality of these attachments. The story attachments themselves occurred within a mix ofmultiple narrative worlds, evoked a complex mix of emotions, and were often sup-ported by variable parental involvement and responses.

Mix of multiple narrative worlds. The children’s engagements with stories, bothfleeting narrative interests and the more sustained story attachments, were not neatlybounded, but waxed and waned among the diary entries often intertwining one withanother. In fact, it was not uncommon for children to be sustaining more than oneidentified story attachment at a time. Emily, for example, whose diary was one of themost extensive (recording 6 story attachments across 5 months) displayed five storyattachments that overlapped in time. On one day alone her mother recorded entriesinvolving three different story attachments—at breakfast Emily recited the MotherGoose poem ‘one, two, buckle my shoe . . .’; before lunch with her mother and brother, Emily acted out the parts of her family’s story about going to the fair; and,later in the day Emily and her mother were looking at an animal book together, whichprompted Emily’s retelling of her mother’s story about running into an opossum onthe trail at night. In some cases documented expressions for one story attachment wereclustered together being repeated day after day, often multiple times a day. Forexample, Emily first saw the video Frosty the Snowman one day in December. Emilysat quietly, intently watching the video—‘She loved it’ her mother reported. At bedtimethat night, she asked to watch it again. Over the next eight days she watched the videoat least fourteen times, sometimes 3–4 times a day, and asked to watch it even moreoften. She became more active as she repeatedly watched the video, laughing andsinging along with the story and the characters. On the third and fourth days of thedocumented attachment, Emily started talking about the story with her family andretelling the story to herself and others. By the fifth day Emily’s mother documentedthat Emily displayed the emotions and acted out the parts of the different characters.By the last documented entry, Emily’s mother reported that Emily was creating newstories with the Frosty the Snowman characters. Other story attachments were less dra-matic than this one, showing long gaps between the documented expressions of storyattachments over time. For example, Emily’s mother first documented her watchingand talking about the Beauty and the Beast video in July. It was over four months later,in late November that the next Beauty and the Beast entry occurred—Emily was sadand wanted to watch the movie for comfort, her mother reported. Later, in DecemberEmily asked to watch Beauty and the Beast two times in one day, in both cases whenshe was sad and wanted to feel better. Across the last three weeks that Emily’s motherkept the diary, there were no more entries relating to Beauty and the Beast.

The intermingling of story characters and actions to create new stories was anexpression of attachment documented only in the diary phase of the study. All five of



the mothers documented ways in which the children created ‘new’ stories throughrepeated engagements with the special story. These new stories often involved trans-formations of ‘bad’ characters into ‘good’ (‘She turned Miss Gulch [the witch in TheWizard of Oz] into a nice witch.’). New stories also could be seen in the creative com-binations of multiple special stories (‘I don’t know why he put Shredder [a TeenageMutant Ninja Turtle] and Flounder and the Little Mermaid together in the same story.But he said that Shredder would save her, I’m not sure from what, and he said thatShredder was his friend when he’s not a bad guy’).

Expressions of story attachments also crossed narrative types and mediums. Inseveral cases, the nature of the child’s special story needed to be coded as ‘mixed’ (e.g.,The Jungle Book storybook and The Bare Necessities video). In some cases, the attach-ments seemed to fit general themes in which multiple narrative practices were expres-sions of the theme. Trevor’s case is a nice example of this intermingling of themes,narratives, attachments, and daily activities. Trevor had only two documented attach-ments, one around the theme of dinosaurs and the movie Land Before Time, and theother attachment around the ‘Ninja Turtles.’Trevor’s fascination with dinosaurs clearlydominated, with 23 diary entries documenting it. The family supported his special inter-est providing him with many props and resources. Trevor played with toy dinosaurs andpulled the marshmallow dinosaurs out of his breakfast cereal to use as toys. He madehis cookie dinosaurs act out fights before they became friends and he pointed out themean dinosaur—‘He was the mean one because his eyes were mean’—who started thefight. When watching Land Before Time, he acted out the parts with the characters onthe tape. He brought dinosaur characters into other stories he acted out (e.g., ‘Trevorcombined dinosaurs with Fievel from An American Tail, and Bunny Fufu from a WeeSing Tape’). He also acted out various dinosaurs for his mother—‘They were all nice[dinosaurs] and would not hurt me’ she recorded in the diary. He talked for the dinosaurstamps he had, creating the characters and their evolving relationships. He listened topeople reading story books and factual books about dinosaurs and asked questions.Dinosaurs were a big part of Trevor’s world. In the last documented entry, Trevor wasstruggling with the issue of extinction, asking about where the dinosaurs had gone—‘He could not understand where the dinos went. He wasn’t really upset just could notfigure out why he’d see them on tv or in books but could not see “real” ones.’ Trevor’sexpressions of attachment often intermingled with each other and with activities in hisdaily life. In one case documented by his mother, Trevor was asking his mother if hermosquito bite hurt—‘I said no it just itches. So he told me he had one and started onhow he was going to catch the mosquito and pull on him, then dinosaurs got in thepicture because Pterodons eat mosquitoes—somewhere along the way the TeenageNinja turtles were also fighting the mosquitoes! It seemed the more intent I became inhis story, the more he had to say and he was pulling stuff out of everywhere just to talkand add to the story whether it made sense or not!’

Complex mix of emotion. The way that emotional attachments play out in storyattachments can also be seen more clearly in the diary data. The mothers documentedthree ways in which the children used their special stories to manage emotions. In thefirst type, the child used her special story to console herself, following some upsettingexperience. Emily’s mother recorded five instances of this sort. On one occasion, Emilyhad been disciplined and was crying in her room. She asked to see Beauty and the Beastand when her mother turned it on for her, ‘she curled up with her blankie on couch withthumb in mouth and stopped crying instantly.’ On another occasion, a distressed Emilypleaded, ‘I just want to see Beauty and the Beast to be happy.’



In the second type, the story itself evoked fear in the child, which gradually sub-sided over the course of repeated engagements with the story. When Jeffrey first sawthe ‘Friend Like Me’ video he was afraid of the genie. On his second viewing, heshowed less fear and increasing pleasure at the sight of the genie. During the thirdviewing, he said, ‘Mommy, I not scared of when the genie comes now. I am big boy!’Isabelle’s mother wrote 12 detailed entries, spanning 16 days, in which she docu-mented Isabelle’s reactions to ‘The Rescuers’ video. In the initial entry she listed sixsegments of the video to which Isabelle responded by hiding in the corner of the room.In the fourth entry, Isabelle no longer hid but put her hands over her ears for three ofthe segments. In the sixth entry, Isabelle neither hid nor put her hands over her earsbut said that she was afraid of thunderstorms and warned her mother about an upcom-ing scary part. In the remaining entries Isabelle’s mother recorded that Isabellewatched intently and occasionally commented on those segments that she was for-merly afraid of and sometimes enacted them with her sister.

The third way in which the children used their special stories was simply to savorand re-visit an enjoyable experience. For example, according to Jeffrey’s mother’sdiary entries, Jeffrey began to dance and sing every time he watched his favorite video.After being away from his tapes for a two-week family vacation, Jeffrey said, ‘Mommy,I so happy to be home to my tapes again!!’ His mother added, ‘He’s thrilled to havehis tapes again after two weeks on the road without TV. He was watching his favoriteparts, including fast forwarding to find them. Clearly a reunion between Jeffrey andhis tapes.’

Variable parental involvement and responses. As with the interview studies, all fiveof the mothers documented ways that they encouraged their children’s story attach-ments. At the same time, however, the diary records show that they did not necessar-ily support each and every engagement with the story; sometimes their responses wereneutral at best, and other times expressions of story attachments were inhibited forreasons other than discouraging the attachment per se. Story attachments had to fitinto familiar routines, and the mothers documented restricting their children’s expres-sions of attachment when those expressions conflicted with other valued family prac-tices. For example, Emily’s intense attachment to Frosty the Snowman crossed aweekend. On Sunday, Emily repeatedly requested to watch her special video, but hermother refused. In her diary entry her mother explained—‘we don’t allow the chil-dren to watch t.v. or videos on Sunday unless religious.’ Her mother reported thatEmily cried. The diaries also bear witness to the mothers’ mixed and changing feel-ings toward attachments. They provide a day-by-day record of a particular trajectoryof change: mothers began with feelings of positive interest and approval but over thecourse of the attachment these feelings sometimes changed to worry, speculation asto the causes of the obsession, and frustration. In response to her child’s attachmentto The Lost Mommy Story, one mother wrote, ‘I loved it!’ Five days later she was,‘wondering what is prompting it.’ After almost two weeks, she speculated about themotivation behind her child’s attachment, ‘I’m wondering if my illness and consequentemotional semi-withdrawal earlier that week are related.’After three weeks of her son’sattachment to ‘The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,’ another mother wrote, ‘It’s good—he’s having fun.’ Six days later she became, ‘confused’ about the intensity of his inter-est. Still another mother initially responded to her son’s attachment to The Jungle Bookwith positive interest, ‘I love these little wheels turning in his mind.’ Nineteen dayslater, she said, ‘We enjoyed it together.’ Four months later, she wrote, ‘It’s cute.’ Thenext day, however, she’d had enough, ‘It’s getting old fast!’



Discussion

This study contributes to a more holistic understanding of young children’s experi-ences of stories by providing evidence that preschoolers from middle-class, European-American families develop strong and sustained emotional attachments to stories.Framed within a theoretical perspective that treats narrative as a form of practice, thisstudy exposes the inherently social nature of story attachments.

Creating Relationships with Story Characters

The findings of this study are consistent with previous case studies. The children dis-played emotional attachments with many stories, often more than one story at a time.Their mothers were able to document these attachments even in the youngest chil-dren—2 year olds were just as likely as 3, 4, and 5 year olds to form attachments tostories. This suggests that the cognitive prerequisites for this emotional engagementwith stories are modest, probably involving little more than some minimal ability tocomprehend the story. These children expressed their attachments to special stories ina variety of ways. They spent time with their stories, carrying books and tapes aroundwith them, repeatedly requesting to hear the story, intently listening to and watchingthe story read to them (or performed in the case of videos), and displaying a varietyof shifting emotional reactions throughout their repeated engagements with theirstories. The children worked through the details of their stories, asking questions aboutthe story characters and their actions, and discussing the stories with others. They alsoengaged with the story characters outside the confines of the story itself. They tookon the roles of the characters, often re-enacting the stories in pretend play and usingthese characters as a basis for creating new stories.

Consistent with the findings of Wolf and Heath (1992), these children’s emotionalengagement with their special stories goes beyond the immediate context of story teller and audience. These varied forms of expression are deeply social experiences.Family members are not only story readers, but are often involved as recipients ofmessages about the child’s special story—partners in discussions, as well as wittingand unwitting characters in story re-enactments. The children, however, are not simplytraversing the social relationships of the family to gain access to, and conversationabout, special stories. Through the expressions of their attachments they are alsodeeply engaged in the social relations found in the stories themselves. The childrenrespond in delight and fear to the evolving relationships of the story characters. They try on the various character roles, taking as their own the relationships of thosecharacters. Finally, by transporting familiar characters into new situations and differ-ent worlds, the children test and forge these relationships in a multitude of socialspaces.

Story Attachments as Social Practice

Young children’s emotional attachments to stories did not occur in a vacuum; theywere embedded in a complex set of social practices by which caregivers directly andindirectly supported the formation of story attachments. For example, the childrenowned video tapes and large quantities of books, borrowed books from the library andregularly rented video tapes. Mothers reported that watching videos and listening tobooks read aloud were the most frequent narrative practices in their families, occur-



ring on a daily basis. Videos and books were also the most frequent sources of storyattachments. Some of the mothers limited their children’s exposure to video tapes, butno one limited exposure to books. Most of the mothers made sure that the child hadaccess to a variety of stories and allowed the child to choose which story would beread, told, or watched. Most mothers said that they encouraged their children’s attach-ments to stories, and this was especially marked for the youngest children. Althoughsome attachments to video stories were discouraged, the majority of mothers said that they took advantage of their children’s attachments to video stories to get theirchores done.

The mothers’ encouragement of narrative attachments is consistent with their beliefin the value of such attachments. The mothers articulated a folk theory that is strik-ingly similar to an idea found in the clinical literature and in work on children’s liter-ature (e.g. Bettelheim, 1977; Miller & Boe, 1990; Trousdale, 1989; Tucker, 1981),namely that the emotional significance of particular stories to the child allows the childto use those stories to manage his or her emotions. More specifically, the mothers saidthat the child seeks an affective connection to the story—an appealing protagonist, aprotagonist who resembles the child, a parallel between his or her own experience andthe events in the story—and that this connection provides the basis on which the childpersonalizes the story, identifies with the characters, and uses the story to regulate hisor her own emotional states. There was a remarkable degree of consensus among themothers in this respect, lending weight to Goodnow and Collins’ (1990) call for moreresearch on parents’ affective beliefs and raising, in particular, questions about the cul-tural sources of these beliefs.

Some mothers also emphasized the safety and comfort that the story world affordedthe child, whereas others emphasized the child’s selective emotional engagement withthe story, the ways in which the child tuned out the disturbing parts or fast forwardedthrough the scary parts. Here again, there is a strong parallel to ideas expressed byclinicians and scholars of children’s literature. The diary records support these claims,documenting several ways in which the children used their special stories to manageemotions: treating the story as a reliable means by which to console oneself follow-ing distressing experiences, conquering fear evoked by the story itself through incre-mental, child-controlled engagement with the scary parts, and revisiting the storyrepeatedly for the pure pleasure of it. These findings not only affirm children’s activeengagement with cultural texts—an idea that unites the discourse practices model ofsocialization with the several literatures reviewed above—but suggest that childrenseek out and use their special stories to manage their own emotional experiences.These findings thus support Miller et al.’s (1993) claim that stories in which the childis strongly invested can serve as powerful tools of emotion regulation within thecontext of supportive caregiving practices. They underscore the need for further worksubstantiating this process in more detail and with a larger number of children.

Despite the fact that mothers’ beliefs and practices were largely supportive of storyattachments, most mothers expressed mixed and changing feelings about their chil-dren’s attachments to particular stories. Many said that they became frustrated or boredas attachments wore on and began to limit the child’s access to the story. The diaryrecords provide corroborative evidence, documenting a change in the mothers’ reac-tions from positive interest and approval at the outset of the attachment to worry, frus-tration, and speculation as to the cause of the child’s obsession. Prolonged attachmentsmay give rise to conflicting parental interpretations: is this healthy or neurotic, cre-ative or self-indulgent? They thereby provide a fruitful site for exploring the para-



doxical and conflicting practices that are an integral part of any cultural system(Goodnow, Miller, & Kessel, 1995).

Methodological Reflections

Because a major purpose of this study was methodological, it is important to assessthe strengths and limitations of the methods used here. The chief strength of the inter-views and diary records for the problem at hand is their ecological validity: they takeadvantage of the mother’s role as a key insider to the family, a role that gives her priv-ileged, long-term access to the child’s affective experience. In addition, these methodsprovide an excellent way to learn about how the mothers make sense of their chil-dren’s attachments to stories, as expressed in their own words. There are several factorsthat enhance the trustworthiness of the interviews and diary records: the mothers par-ticipated readily, elaborated at length in many of their responses, admitted to discrep-ancies between their beliefs and practices, and talked/wrote as freely about videostories and practices as they did about written stories and bookreading practicesalthough the former are probably less ‘socially desirable’ than the latter among highlyeducated parents.

Although both the interview and diary methods relied on maternal reports, thesemethods differed in some respects. The interview, even when limited to currentlyongoing attachments, placed a bigger strain on the mother’s memory and yielded lessdetailed accounts than did the diary study, in which observations were recorded on thespot or soon thereafter. The strength of the diary study was that it permitted day-by-day documentation of changes in the participants’ involvement with the story; itsweakness was that it was too labor-intensive to be used with more than a few subjects.This study suggests that both the interview and diary collaboration with caregivers areviable ways of studying young children’s attachments to stories. Moreover, the con-vergence of evidence from these two sources strengthens the results of the presentstudy.

However, adequate documentation of the natural history of story attachmentsrequires more than maternal reports. It requires audio and/or video recording of actualinteractions between child, story, and other participants of the sort presented in Milleret al. (1993) and Wolf and Heath (1992). Such recordings capture the child’s repeatedengagements with his or her special stories with sufficient precision to permit micro-level analysis of discourse and interaction. Such analyses are necessary in order togain deeper insight into the actual process by which children, in cooperation with otherfamily members, use and re-use their special stories for affective purposes.

Future Directions

We hope that the results of this study will draw attention to an important socioemo-tional phenomenon that has been recognized in various fields of inquiry but underappreciated by developmentalists. Story attachments pose a host of interesting ques-tions for future developmental research. The first concerns developmental changes inchildren’s attachments to stories. Given that the preschool years are a time of rapid lin-guistic development, it is likely that changes occur in the ways in which childrenexpress their attachments. This study suggests that retellings and memorization arelikely candidates for developmental change. At the same time, this study draws atten-tion to an important aspect of children’s socioemotional life—the capacity to invest



oneself in stories—that is remarkably stable across the preschool years and probablybeyond. Also worthy of study is the question of how young children use, develop, andre-shape their story attachments within the context of expanding peer networks. Whathappens, for example, when two nursery school playmates discover that they share a passion for the same story? Or when young friends introduce one another to their (different) special stories? Another important question concerns the place and value of story attachments within the larger array of tools for emotion management. Forexample, do stories play a unique role in emotion management or are there other semi-otic resources that serve similar ends? And, finally, this study underscores the need toinvestigate story attachments in other sociocultural groups. The educated, middle-class,European-American mothers in this study showed remarkable consensus in the folktheory that they invoked for making sense of children’s emotional involvement withstories. Future work needs to address the diversity of folk theories and social practicesthat constitute story attachments or related phenomena in other sociocultural groups.

Appendix A

The Written DiaryDate_______Time_________Setting______________________________________Person(s) present: ___mother___father____other(s) *whom____Recorded__yes__no

1. Is this__book__video__story about something that happened to Emily__storyabout something that happened to someone whom Emily knows___another type ofstory_____

2. What is the title or content of the story?_________________________________

3. What is Emily doing? (Check all that apply)___watching the video___telling/repeating the story to herself___telling/repeating the story to another *to whom_______________________________asking questions about the story or story characters___listening to someone read a book to her___listening to someone tell her a story about something she experienced___talking about something that happened to her___acting or pretending to be the story character(s)___listening and looking intently___sleeping with the tape/book___carrying the tape/book about___talking about the story or story characters *to whom__________________________create a new story using the story characters___other *decribe______________________________________________________

4. How long did this activity last?___1–5 minutes___5–10 minutes___10–30 minutes___30–45 minutes___45 minutes-1 hour___more than 1 hour

5. What feelings did Emily express?_______________________________________

6. Which parts of the story does Emily seem to be most ‘tuned in’ to?_________________________________________________________________________________

7. How could you tell that she was so ‘tuned in’?_________________________________________________________________________________________________



8. Is there anything else about this episode that really stands out to you?______________________________________________________________________________

9. How did you feel about this episode?________________________________________________________________________________________________________

*Please add any additional comments on the back of this page.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a grant from the Institutional Review Board of the Universityof Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1995biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development. We wish to thank the fami-lies who participated in this study; we are especially indebted to the mothers who participatedin the diary study. We are also grateful to Sarah Mangelsdorf for insightful criticisms as theresearch progressed and to Betsy Hearne for introducing us to the world of children’s litera-ture. Special thanks to Lisa Burger and Susan Haery for their able assistance with transcrip-tion and coding.

Young Children's Emotional Attachments to Stories

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