Why Storytelling Is So Powerful for Building Empathy in Children

Long before children can explain what empathy means, they’re already practising it through stories. They worry when a character is frightened, become furious when somebody is treated unfairly and desperately hope everything works out for a person who doesn’t actually exist.

When you think about it, that’s quite extraordinary. A child can be sitting safely on the sofa while imagining what it might feel like to be lost in a forest, or living somewhere completely different from home. For a little while, they’re experiencing the world from a perspective other than their own.

That’s one of the reasons storytelling can play such an interesting role in helping children develop empathy. Rather than simply telling them that other people have different feelings and experiences. Stories give children somewhere to explore those differences for themselves.

Borrowing Someone Else’s Point of View

Children naturally begin life at the centre of their own world. As they grow, they gradually discover that everybody around them is wandering about with thoughts, worries, hopes and experiences of their own. Stories give them an entertaining way to explore that idea.

A character might desperately want something the reader wouldn’t choose themselves, while somebody who initially seems annoying may turn out to be lonely, or misunderstood. Another character could make a terrible decision that becomes easier to understand once we know what led to it.

Children don’t have to agree with those choices to become curious about them, and that’s an important distinction. Empathy isn’t the same as approval. Understanding why somebody behaved in a particular way doesn’t mean deciding their behaviour was acceptable. It simply introduces the possibility that there may be more behind another person’s actions than we can see from the outside.

Within a story, children can explore those different perspectives without also having to deal with the emotions and consequences of a real-life disagreement.

People Are Complicated, and Characters Can Be Too

There’s a temptation when creating stories for children to make the message wonderfully clear. The kind character gets rewarded, the mean character learns a lesson and everybody reaches the final page knowing exactly what the story was supposed to teach them.

Real people are considerably messier than that, which is part of what makes interesting characters so useful. Someone can be generous in one chapter and selfish in the next. Characters misunderstand people, become jealous, make poor decisions and sometimes hurt someone they genuinely care about. Even the characters we love can behave badly.

Those contradictions give children plenty to think about without somebody explaining exactly how they should feel. They can wonder why a character behaved that way, whether they were actually trying to be horrible and what they might have done differently in the same situation.

Questions like these leave room for children to form their own interpretations. They also reflect something important about empathy: understanding another person doesn’t require us to agree with everything they do, just as caring about their feelings doesn’t mean abandoning our own.

Stories Can Make Difference Feel Less Distant

A child’s immediate world can only introduce them to so many people, but stories can open the door to thousands more. Through books, films, games and storytelling, children can encounter families that look nothing like their own, communities they’ve never visited and characters whose bodies, cultures, abilities, beliefs or experiences may be completely unfamiliar.

A story might take them hundreds of years into the past or halfway around the world. It can also show them something as ordinary as a day at school through the eyes of a child who experiences that day very differently from them.

Stories don’t replace knowing real people, and other people’s lives shouldn’t be reduced to neat little lessons about diversity. What storytelling can do is widen a child’s sense of whose experiences are interesting and worth paying attention to.

Familiarity can also change the way difference feels. A character may initially seem unusual because of one particular part of their life, but after spending time with them, the reader discovers that they’re funny, stubborn, brave, irritating, frightened or wonderfully weird. The thing that made them seem different becomes just one part of a much bigger person.

Caring Because the Story Made Us Care

Adults can tell children they should care about other people, and there are certainly times when that reminder is useful. Stories approach the same territory differently because nobody needs to stop halfway through an exciting chapter and announce that it’s time to practise empathy.

Children become invested because they want to know what happens. They hope the character escapes, finds their friend, gets home safely, stands up to the bully or finally tells somebody what has been bothering them. By the time they’re emotionally involved, they’ve already spent time thinking about what that character wants and how they might be feeling.

That makes storytelling particularly powerful. The experience doesn’t begin with an instruction to be empathetic; it begins with curiosity, and caring can grow naturally from there.

Even Villains Have a Story

Children’s stories have given us some spectacular villains over the years. Wicked queens, cruel giants, horrible teachers and various creatures with questionable plans for anyone wandering through their forest have entertained generations of children, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a wonderfully terrible villain.

Stories can become interesting in a different way, though, when children occasionally discover that difficult characters have histories too. The person causing trouble may feel excluded, frightened or desperate to belong. Perhaps they’ve learned their behaviour from somebody else or they’re handling an experience they don’t know how to express.

Knowing that background doesn’t excuse cruelty, but it can help children understand that behaviour rarely appears from nowhere. Somebody can act badly and still have feelings, fears and experiences worth understanding.

Children will meet people they dislike and encounter behaviour they shouldn’t tolerate. Empathy doesn’t ask them to accept mistreatment or keep somebody in their life simply because they understand why that person behaves the way they do. It gives them another way to make sense of the complicated humans they’ll meet along the way.

Talking About Stories Can Take Us Further

Some of the best conversations happen once the book is closed, particularly when adults resist the urge to turn them into a comprehension test. Rather than asking children to identify the moral, we can find out which character they liked, who annoyed them or whether anything in the story surprised them.

We might talk about the moment that made them angry, ask what they would have done differently or discover whether they thought the ending was fair. Their interpretation could be completely different from ours because every reader brings their own experiences to a story.

Two children can read exactly the same book and sympathise with entirely different characters. Instead of looking for the correct response, we can become curious about how they arrived at their view.

There’s something rather fitting about that. A conversation about understanding a fictional character becomes an opportunity for adults to listen to a child’s perspective, especially when it’s different from our own.

Children Need to Recognise Themselves Too

Stories can open windows into unfamiliar lives, but children also need the experience of recognising something of themselves. Seeing a character who thinks, feels, struggles or lives in a familiar way can create a powerful sense of recognition, particularly when an experience has previously made a child feel unusual or alone.

That matters when we’re talking about empathy because understanding other people doesn’t require children to push their own experiences aside. Their lives deserve space in stories too.

A rich collection of storytelling can offer both familiarity and difference. Sometimes a child should encounter a character who makes them think, “That’s exactly how I feel.” On another day, they might meet someone whose view of the world makes absolutely no sense to them at first.

Both experiences encourage children to think beyond the surface of a character and consider what life feels like from another point of view.

Storytelling Happens Everywhere

Books are wonderful, but they certainly don’t have a monopoly on storytelling. Children encounter narratives through films, television, games, podcasts, comics, theatre and the stories families tell around the dinner table.

They also create enormous numbers of stories themselves. Give children a cardboard box, a handful of toys or an empty patch of garden and a surprisingly complicated world can appear. Characters form friendships, arguments break out, rules are invented and, sooner or later, there’s a reasonable chance somebody will be eaten by a dragon.

Underneath all that chaos, children are experimenting with different perspectives. They decide what their characters want, how they feel and what happens when one person’s needs collide with somebody else’s.

Games can create similar opportunities by allowing children to make decisions from another character’s perspective and then see what happens. The story doesn’t have to announce an empathy lesson for children to spend time thinking about motives, consequences and relationships.

Let Stories Be Stories

Once we recognise that storytelling can help children develop empathy, there’s a risk of looking at every book, film or game and asking what educational value we can squeeze out of it. That can quickly take the joy out of something children already understand instinctively.

Children deserve stories that make them laugh, frighten them a little, surprise them and have them begging for one more chapter. They should meet absurd characters, explore impossible worlds and enjoy stories for no better reason than they’re great fun.

Empathy can develop quietly within those experiences. A child may love a character whose life looks nothing like their own, feel sorry for somebody they initially disliked or begin to understand why two people can experience exactly the same situation differently. None of those moments needs to be turned into a lesson afterwards.

Over years of storytelling, children can encounter hundreds of lives beyond their own. Along the way, they begin to discover that people are complicated, appearances don’t always tell the whole story and everybody sees the world from somewhere.

That’s one of the things we love about storytelling at Zorzle. We can send children into ridiculous, funny, exciting and completely impossible worlds while giving them opportunities to understand something very real about this one. The world looks different depending on whose eyes you’re looking through, and stories give us the wonderful opportunity to borrow somebody else’s for a while.

Join the Zorzle Conversation

We’d love you to be part of the Zorzle conversation. Together, we’re exploring how kindness, curiosity, courage and laughter can shape the world around us and the one our children will inherit.

Come and join us on Substack for more stories, ideas and conversations. Or settle in with the Love, Laughter & Kindness podcast as we meet people, share experiences and explore what a kinder future could look like.