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1 | P a g e

Children's books with human characters can make a big difference

Forget the morals that children over the years have learned from the hare and the tortoise and the fox and the crow. Children's author Aesop would have had a greater effect with his fables if he’d put the stories into the mouths of human characters. At least, that is the finding of new research from the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). Sharing Is Caring In the Canadian study, researchers read one of three stories to almost 100 children between 4 and 6 years old. One was Mary Packard’s "Little Raccoon Learns to Share," in which anthropomorphic, or human-like, animals learn that sharing makes you feel good. In another version of the story, the animal illustrations were replaced with human characters. The third story was a book about seeds used as a control in the experiment. Before they were read the story, the children chose 10 stickers to take home. They were told that an unknown child would not have any stickers to take home. It was suggested to the children that they could share their stickers with the stickerless child by putting them in an envelope when the experimenter was not looking. After they were read the story, the children were allowed to choose another 10 stickers. They were again asked to donate to the stickerless child. The study was just published in the journal Developmental Science. It found that children who were read the book with human characters became more generous and donated the most stickers. However, “there was no difference in generosity between children who read the book with anthropomorphized animal characters and the control book; both groups showed a decrease in sharing behavior,” the study said. Stories With Talking Animals Have Little Effect The scientists were led by Patricia Ganea, an associate professor at OISE. They said that existing studies using the same method showed that before they are 6, “children share hardly any stickers with their friends." The studies showed that "even after age 6, children keep most of the stickers for themselves,” they said. So the task “offers a lot of room for children to change their sharing behavior after reading the story.” But reading a book about sharing had an immediate effect on children’s pro-social, or helpful, behavior, they found. “However, the type of story characters significantly affected whether children became more or less inclined to behave prosocially. After hearing the story containing real human characters, young children became more generous. In contrast, after hearing the same story but with anthropomorphized animals or a control story, children became more selfish.” Ganea said that a growing body of research has shown that young children more readily apply what they’ve learned from stories that are realistic. However, "this is the first time we found something similar for social behaviors.” “The finding is surprising given that many stories for young children have human-like animals,” said Ganea.

11 | Amazing Race to Grad

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13 | Amazing race to grad

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