Do children learn anything from stories? What research says about stories and behaviour

Parents naturally reach for stories “with a moral”. Over the past 15 years, research in developmental psychology has shown which features of a story decide whether a child takes something away from it.

Do children understand the moral of a story?#

Often not in the way the author imagined. Studies with third- and fifth-graders showed that the ability to grasp a story’s moral theme goes on developing for a long time and lags behind understanding of the text itself — fifth-graders understood it less well than adults (Narvaez et al., 1998; 1999). Younger children also often take the moral literally: when 64 kindergarten children watched a 10-minute episode meant to encourage acceptance of people with disabilities, most of them didn’t grasp the intended lesson and didn’t carry it beyond the specific plot (Mares & Acosta, 2008 — the study is aptly titled “Be kind to three-legged dogs”).

What helps? In an experiment with children aged 5–6, it was enough for an adult to ask them to explain why something happened in the story. The children then found the point and carried it over to new situations more often — in some cases better than when the adult simply told them what it was (Walker & Lombrozo, 2017).

Do children learn better from stories about animals or about people?#

With young children, it tends to be stories about people. Preschoolers carried the solution to a problem from a story over into real life more easily when it involved real people than when it involved fantasy characters (Richert et al., 2009). Another study showed that children seem to “keep fantasy stories separate” from the real world (Richert & Smith, 2011). And when the world of a story resembled reality, even three-year-olds generalised more from it; telling realistic and fantasy settings apart improves between the ages of 3 and 5 (Walker, Gopnik & Ganea, 2015).

The most concrete example is an experiment on sharing: an adult read preschoolers a story about sharing with human characters, the same story with animals that behave like people, or a control story. Willingness to share went up only after the story with people (Larsen, Lee & Ganea, 2018). It is one study with one task — a strong signal, not a law.

This doesn’t mean “no dragons”. It means: a magical world can be the setting, but the moment when the hero does the right thing should look like real life, and it should be a person who does it.

Does reading stories develop empathy?#

A little. A meta-analysis of 14 studies found that reading fiction improves social understanding (for example, working out what someone else is thinking) only slightly (g ≈ 0.15), and whether this shows up in real behaviour has not been tested (Dodell-Feder & Tamir, 2018). A well-known study in the journal Science, which reported that a single passage of literary fiction improves “mind-reading” (Kidd & Castano, 2013), was not confirmed when researchers tried to repeat it (Panero et al., 2016). This is research with adults — for children there is even less evidence.

Does a parent have to sit next to the child while they read?#

For understanding and vocabulary, not necessarily. A meta-analysis of 29 studies found that narrated multimedia stories children listened to without an adult supported comprehension and vocabulary, with results no different from sharing a print book with an adult (Takacs, Swart & Bus, 2014). That meta-analysis did not test independent reading. When children learned words from books, what mattered most was whether there was talk during the reading and how many times a word came up; whether it was a parent, a teacher or a researcher doing the reading didn’t matter (Flack, Field & Horst, 2018).

Talking does help, though. When parents asked questions while their three-year-olds watched a video, the children understood more and learned more words than with parents who only made comments, or with no input at all; when an actress asked the questions directly in the video, the results were somewhere in between (Strouse, O'Doherty & Troseth, 2013). The benefit of talking during reading (dialogic reading) is greatest for the youngest children (Mol et al., 2008). And note: in the experiments on prosocial behaviour that we looked at, an adult did the reading — we have no direct evidence that reading in itself changes behaviour.

Interestingly, a computer narrator that asked children aged 3–6 pre-prepared questions during a story achieved a similar benefit to a human in story comprehension; the children talked more about the plot and went off on tangents less (Xu et al., 2022). What was measured was comprehension, not values or behaviour, and it wasn’t a free-flowing conversation with AI.

Do interactive features in e-books help?#

Only when they serve the story. A meta-analysis of 43 studies showed a small benefit of animation and sound for comprehension (g = 0.17), but games, clickable hotspots and dictionaries in the middle of the story distracted children (Takacs, Swart & Bus, 2015).

What this means for parents#

• Choose stories where the step is realistic and a person takes it.
• Every now and then, ask “why did she do that?” — not “what can you learn from this?”.
• Read it again. Repetition helps.
• Don’t expect one story to “fix” behaviour. It’s the start of a conversation.

How our comics work#

We design them to carry as much as possible even when a child reads alone: the hero is the child themselves (a person), the step they can copy comes from real life and the hero does it in the story — nobody spells out the moral, the child sees it in action; a “why?” question comes up in the plot and the answer only arrives on the next page, so the child has time to think it through. Each book is a complete story of its own (not a series). Whether this also works when children read on their own is something we will be testing with children. Talking it over with you is an optional bonus — research says it can help, but it isn’t a requirement. We don’t promise a change in behaviour; we promise a story built on what we know about learning from stories.