ABSTRACT
Humans have an excellent memory for stories, and brains manage information for the long term through story. Inner story reduces information to its minimal narrative configuration (“gist”); expanding that condensed story for others (“narrating”) is a creative process and adduces information (not necessarily the original details). Children build identity through a history of inner stories, and they validate that identity through telling their stories. Inner stories are not domain specific but rather synesthetic; children’s books can likewise involve multiple senses at once. Children’s books not only offer safe zones for social construction; they also are training grounds in information management. Storying, like sentence-level language processing, interfaces with event modeling, predetermination, logic, and of course the linguistic faculty. Authors can specifically challenge the child’s skills in each of these domains and distribute the cognitive load across them. The chapter gives examples of works that emphasize event modeling, predetermination, logic, and linguistic skills (or balance them equally). Being able to coordinate language and other cognitive faculties empowers the child, who becomes experienced at cognitive self-appraisal and narrative authorship.
