Witches, fire, and fairies: Parent–child conversations during fantastic and real emotionally charged stories

Abstract

Preschoolers' fantasy–reality distinctions vary by the emotional content of the information; they report that happy and sad fantastic or real events can occur more often than frightening events. Given that children rely on parents' testimony when evaluating information, the present study examined the role parents play in children's fantasy–reality distinctions for emotionally charged events. Fifty‐nine parents and their 3‐ to 5‐year‐olds read happy, frightening, and sad stories that contained either fantastic or real events. Conversations during the readings were coded and analysed for patterns across story conditions. Findings reveal that topics of conversations differed significantly by discrete emotion and at times by reality status. Parents and children engaged with happy and sad events (e.g., by relating events to children's lives and helping the story characters) and distanced themselves from frightening events (e.g., by ameliorating the situation and switching negative tone to positive). Findings provide new insights into how parents talk to children about emotionally charged fantasy and reality that contribute to our understanding of how children construct their understanding of real and unreal information. Highlights The study examined parent–child conversations about happy, frightening, and sad fantastic and real events. While reading stories, parents and children interacted with the happy and sad events and distanced themselves from the frightening events. Conversations about fantasy and reality may influence children's fantasy–reality distinctions.

Emerging Ideas: Father–child exchanges, configurations, and discourse during shared book‐reading: An interaction analysis

“…Discourse studies have found that parents using more varied words and longer utterances benefited children's emerging vocabulary and language development (Baker et al, 2015; Pancsofar et al, 2010), emotion understanding (Gavazzi & Ornaghi, 2011), and empathic behaviors (Drummond et al, 2014). Additionally, most research in this area has predominantly studied the role of mothers and their discourse while engaging in these practices (Brownell et al, 2013; Carrick et al, 2018; Tompkins, 2015). A review of picture‐book‐reading with children aged birth to 3 years examined parent characteristics and behaviors and confirmed that most studies of SBR focused on upper‐ and middle‐class, White mothers and their children and that the quality of parents' behaviors during SBR facilitates language development (Fletcher & Reese, 2005).…”