The Gift of Gab
by Cherry Pua-Africa

“Mom, please sit down, let’s have a chat.” I was in my usual screensaver mode, with eyes ogled in front of my monitor. My peripheral vision caught the beguiling image of my 5 year old daughter with her mouth open, impatient to let the kernels of her story be heard.

“Please wait, I need to finish….”

“But mom! This can’t wait!” I knew even before I finished my sentence that this was not an acceptable answer. I’ve lived with my daughter 5 years, 2 months, 14 days and 5 hours enough to know that when she wants to host a talk show, everyone has to listen. The last time I checked with Dr. Spock, parents are still expected to hold regular family bonding sessions. And for our family, bonding times consisted of conversations and storytelling sessions. These were sacred rituals to us. To keep the important occasion of telling stories from slipping away too quickly, we’ve spiced up our family story times by gathering together around a mat and reciting the storyteller’s chant. Everyone in the family has to share a story — an office story, a fairy tale, a story about friends or even a tall tale. When it’s time to transmute our fabulous ideas into the viable format of a storyline, all eyes, ears and hearts have to be committed to the process.

Last night was no different, story time cannot be breached. But I was busy. I had an important deadline to meet.

“Go on, tell me your story,” I urged her.

“Mom, I won’t start. If you want to listen, your eyes should look into mine. That’s what listening is. ”

I looked at my daughter with a smile. Those were the exact same words I used when she looked away while I ranted about her behavior every time she did something wrong. Looking at how desperate she was for an audience, my thoughts drifted back 3 years ago when I gave a workshop at the Chicago National Storyteller’s Congress. There, I met John, a storyteller who predicted that my daughter will grow up to be another storyteller. “Why?” I asked, curious since he had not met her before. John replied, “Because she has the GIFT OF GAB.” John was referring to the prophecy of a name. You see, my daughter’s name is GABBY. The gift of the gab is given to those who talk a lot. The primitive Celtic word for mouth was Gab, but the expression is more likely based on the Middle English Gabbe meaning “idle talk”. True enough, Gabby grew up enjoying language. I’ve kept a diary of her delicious anecdotes where stories for this column will spring from in the next weeks to come.

So last night, I was deciding whether to leave Gabby alone in her idle talk or to reward her persistence with my undivided attention. Seeing how telling stories has helped Gabby enrich her language skills, I had to stop working and had to invest more time for something that she and I both value: stories. Gabby grew up in a language-rich environment. Being a storyteller and writer myself helped since she was immersed in a print-rich environment. Our love for narratives continue to build up minute by minute, page by page.

When Gabby was 2 years old, she composed a story about a giraffe in a library that met a snake that hissed through a house with a caterpillar inside it that bit the wheels of a car and that left the wheels of the car flat. At two years, she was able to create her own story with good rhythm and exciting sounds, very similar to the tale of The House that Jack Built. In fact, literary experts called this type of story a cumulative tale. Now at age 5, my daughter enjoys reading various narrative genres like trickster tales, fractured fairy tales, Dr. Seuss nonsensical rhymes, folktales, myths, legends and contemporary realistic fiction. When she was big enough to assemble a string of words, one of the first sentences she told me was “Mommy, read me a story.” She learned to complain early in life, too. “Mommy, you read fast. Your stories are short!”
She passed on this addiction to stories to her one year old sister, Dani. Dani now chatters endlessly and enjoys stories with lots of 3’s in them: The Three Bears, The Three Blind Mice, The Three Little Pigs and so on.

In both work and home, I discovered that with stories, children are no longer voiceless. Words should be encouraged to come bountifully, bringing with them a sense of wonder and strength. I enjoy telling stories because I found that they do not only create a sense of mystery and of wonder among children, they also create relationships. Furthermore, it gives them a context for words which would otherwise sound “big” to a non reader. Just think about the range of language a child encounters in a story – the sound, the colour, the taste and the movement of words.

In my work, I get the chance to casually ask parents how they spend their time with their children. Parents usually complained about TV and computer robbing them off their precious moments of bonding with their children. As parents, we would want to keep our children away from TV as much as we possibly can and turn them to books. However, because we sometimes run out of breath and out of time doing our day jobs, TV seemed like a logical surrogate parent. I’ve learned never to compete with TV. Given a choice between story telling and television viewing, I’d lose my day job hands down. It’s like asking a child to choose between chocolates and vegetables. But be wary of too much TV viewing. Statistics showed that a child’s school scores begin to drop after about 10 TV hours a week. So, set the rules and limit TV viewing.

If our children’s source of life and breath is the remote control device, it’s never too late to get them to enjoy reading stories. Children do become what we believe they are. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy for them. If we believe that children have short attention spans and we don’t expose them to long and complicated books or tell them good stories, we are depriving them of the language learning they need to prepare them for 21st century communication.

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And here’s to parents who get tired of their children’s nonstop stories, DON’T! Standards, as well as habits are formed early. Children need to be guided towards creating stories, sentences, books and pictures. So keep on inviting them to conversations and carry on the rich tradition of passing stories, even our own family stories.

One of my favourite authors, Roald Dahl said, “A stodgy parent is not fun at all. What a child deserves is someone who is sparky!” I say, let’s sweat our brows, be sparky and blow our children’s minds with stories. Share the gift of gab to our children, young and old. Try and make story time a family ritual and see if it works…for after all the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Enjoy your children’s delicious bowl of stories and watch out for more of mine, too. In the meantime, Gabby wants to pick a kernel from her own bowl and I’m all ears.

Cherry Pua-Africa is the managing director of Never Ending Story Singapore. She is a teacher trainer and a storyteller with a masters degree in Education. She has conducted workshops around the region and is a consultant in various schools in the USA, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines. She has produced storytelling CDs, written award winning books, directed children’s plays and managed speech and drama centres and English language schools. At present, she’s living in Kuala Lumpur with two chatty daughters and a loving husband. Cherry can be reached at cherry@neverendstory,com or at 60123719910. You can visit her site at www.neverendstory.com