Sharing Stories With Our Kids

A post from my wife Maya.

While I was reading this I got thinking about how our kids might never know about the pre-digital world we inhabited – about letters, land lines, rotary instruments my grandparents had, touch-tone phones, paper maps, pen pals, waiting for the mailman, telegrams etc. They might see it in movies but that’s impersonal. How do we get our kids to know of a bygone world? How do we convey?

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117/366 – Retro by Ravi Shah

The simplest way is to talk about those days. To share stories. A good storyteller can transport listeners to the times she is talking about. We can pull out old pictures and talk about the times those were taken in. Ask the kids what they don’t see in our homes that are there in pictures from our young age. A simple ‘Spot the Difference’ kind of exercise. It can be fun and enlightening.

We know a lot of things about the world inhabited by our parents because they spoke of those times. Our grandparents spoke of how they grew up. This is how memories are passed on via stories and also how connectivity is brought between generations. Today we might do it, but tomorrow our kids will have to do it in the future when the current digital age morphs and becomes a thing of the past!