What Will We Tell the Kids?

Those of us who have children, or have children we love, can remember times when we’ve worried over “what will we tell the kids?” We can look to our own childhoods to see the tapestry woven from the stories told to us by the adults in our lives. Generational legacies are preserved by what is passed on, and what is dropped out of family histories.

As storytellers, we entertain. But the actual weight of our work lies in deciding what survives to be passed down. Like visual artists who leave vivid impressions of what life is like at each point in time, we use words to fill in the spaces of what it feels like to be alive in those times. More than telling the facts (the first manned lunar landing occurred on July 20th, 1969 at 20:17:40 UTC), we express the emotional truth (this event was accompanied by a sense of American exceptionalism and national pride that competed with spending priorities like poverty, hunger, and pollution). Future generations need honesty about fear, anger, power, pride or resilience as much as they need accuracy. If we flatten or sanitize those, our kids inherit a distorted map of being human.

The best stories have captivating heroes and villains. Rarely is a character “all good” or “all bad.” There is a temptation to collapse people into good and bad categories and this is what gets passed down. By preserving the complexity of people, the writing can show the coexistence of loving and harmful, brave and introverted, or shy and outspoken. When stories retain that tension, they teach future readers how to think, not what to think, by broadening these personalities and their roles in historic events.

Every era has experiences that feel invisible or unspeakable. Wars, assassinations, starvations, and persecutions come first to mind. Death camps. Before the COVID-19 pandemic we all lived through (over 7 million deaths), there was the “Spanish” Influenza 1918-1920 (~50m deaths) and the bubonic plague “Black Death” of 1346-1353 which wiped out 30%-60% of Europe’s population. [1,2]. Writers give names to these and provide a context for both the suffering and the heroism. How would anyone in the future know about the medical personnel who stretched beyond themselves to provide care even when surrounded by so many patients who were dying? How would our kids have a role model for service and compassion if they didn’t read about the everyday woman/man who stepped up to assist wherever they could? When we name the horrors, we hand future generations a vocabulary for their own era. We don’t edit out the tough parts just to make a narrative easier to read. We give our kids tools to cope with the situations in front of them. In parallel with fact finding and problem solving.

Stories decide whose lives matter. If only certain voices are preserved, the future inherits a narrow definition of humanity. Our responsibility is intentional inclusion by expanding who gets to take center stage. Feature writing about seemingly “minor” characters adds the color to events that round out how a society lives at each time. What if Harriet Tubman’s (1822-1913) name was lost to history among the many names of escaped slaves and later generations never knew of her dedication to freedom and justice? And what about the Greek storyteller Aesop (c. 620 - 564 BCE)? His fables are a household name. Was he a real person? Was he Greek? Scattered details place him as a slave who won his freedom and became an adviser to kings. Although details may be sparse or scattered, they have been collected by storytellers through the ages and laid out for each generation to see and judge for themselves.

It is not enough to document what is broken in our society. Stories model what transformation looks like. After natural disasters, we see people rebuilding. We adapt all the time to changing economic conditions, new politics, and fluctuating global tensions. So far, we have always been able to begin again from wherever we have fallen. If we pass down possibilities in addition to warnings, this information becomes a blueprint for those who come after us.

Future generations won’t remember every storyline. They will remember the feeling our writing leaves behind if we leave emotional artifacts along with the plotlines. These artifacts influence what the reader carries away, and they outlast the memory of details and facts. The carried feelings become a part of how our kids interpret their own experiences. What changed them? What stayed the same?

And what to do with it all.

1. Klobucista, Claire (ed.), “Major Pandemics of the Modern Era.” Council on Foreign Relations. https://www.cfr.org

2. Madhav, N. and Oppenheim, B. et al. “Pandemics: Risks, Impacts, and Mitigation.” Disease Control Priorities: Improving Health and Reducing Poverty (3rd ed.). 23 Apr 2024. National Institutes of Health https.//www.ncbi.nim.nih.gov.

Love, Alice