Sharing your childhood stories…and a smile

Posted on June 6, 2014

“We forget things if we have no one to tell them to.”

How many times have you heard someone say, “When I was a kid, we had to walk two miles to school in the snow! Uphill both ways!” Parents tend to tell their children stories from their own upbringing as a way of making the kids realize how privileged they are. For example, a parent will say, ‘We didn’t have an iPad or a game system when we were little,” or “I only got a five-dollar allowance when I was your age.”

But we tend to forget to share our own personal fun stories with our kids. Maybe you saved two dollars a week from your five-dollar-a-week allowance for ten weeks to buy a secondhand twenty-dollar radio that only worked for a week. Or perhaps your walk to school passed a pond where you fed ducks every day. Sharing such stories gives us the opportunity to smile and connect with our children. It helps keep alive our memories of childhood and other special moments—filling our hearts and our children’s with joy. How much better is that than making them feel guilty about their privileged lives?

So the next time you start to tell your child about something from your own childhood, make it a fun—or funny—story. If we don’t share these moments with our children, we will forget them and perhaps lose a little of our past. Wouldn’t you rather cherish and enjoy those memories by telling them to your kids? After all, who loves a story better than a child—especially one that stars the parent!