How Stories Build Empathy and Imagination in Early Childhood

How Stories Build Empathy and Imagination in Early Childhood

You probably already sense that bedtime reading matters. You feel it in the way your child leans in, asks to do the same page again, or wakes up the next morning still thinking about what happened to the little fox in the forest. What is harder to see — but no less real — is what is happening inside them while you read.

Understanding how stories help child development means looking past the obvious literacy gains. A story is one of the earliest and most reliable ways a young child learns that other people have inner lives of their own.

Why a bedtime story is quietly building a whole inner world

The American Academy of Pediatrics first called on pediatricians to promote reading aloud daily from infancy in its landmark 2014 policy statement, and reaffirmed and extended that recommendation in a 2024 update. The emphasis is not only on literacy. It is on reading within nurturing parent-child relationships — because the relationship is doing developmental work that the words alone cannot do.

When you sit with a child and open a book, you are not just transmitting vocabulary. You are creating the conditions in which a child can safely inhabit a perspective that is not their own. That is the quiet work of every bedtime story.

Theory of mind: how stepping into a character teaches a child that other minds exist

Around ages three and four, something shifts in how children understand the world. They begin to grasp — slowly, imperfectly, with your help — that other people can have beliefs, wishes, and feelings that differ from their own. Developmental psychologists call this acquiring theory of mind.

Research published in Frontiers in Psychology by Kucirkova (2019) describes cognitive empathy — understanding what others think — as the primary empathy skill that storybooks promote. It is also where theory of mind lives. And storybooks are unusually well-suited to building it, because they invite a child to inhabit a mind other than their own for the duration of a story.

That same research identifies one contribution as especially valuable: identification with characters who are dissimilar from the reader. Not the character who looks and acts like your child, but the one who is different. When a child follows an unfamiliar perspective with genuine care, they are doing the harder imaginative work — and that is the work that stretches cognitive empathy furthest.

Empathy and perspective-taking, especially for lives unlike their own

The link between fiction and empathy has attracted serious scientific interest. A 2013 study by Kidd and Castano published in Science found that reading literary fiction — texts rich in markers of inner life and reflective function — improved adults' performance on theory-of-mind tasks compared to reading nonfiction or popular fiction. It is worth noting that later preregistered replications produced mixed results, so the finding should be held with some care. But the underlying mechanism the researchers described — that literary texts require us to fill in the gaps of another person's inner world — matches what developmental researchers see in children.

The implication for parents is a simple one. A story about a child who is lonely, or frightened, or from a very different kind of family, is not just broadening your child's world. It is exercising the muscle they will use every time they try to understand someone who does not think or feel as they do.

Giving big feelings their names: stories and emotional vocabulary

Before children can regulate a feeling, they need a word for it. Stories do a specific kind of work here.

Research on early emotional development consistently shows that naming a child's feelings during everyday moments — including reading — helps them build emotional vocabulary and better understand their own inner world. A story gives you the naming opportunity one step removed from the heat of the moment. When the character is frustrated, you can say "she's really frustrated right now — do you think she knows how to ask for help?" with none of the stakes of your child's actual frustration.

This is not incidental. Research on shared reading found that children whose mothers used cognitive verbs — think, believe, remember, know, understand — during book-reading showed higher understanding of mental states afterward, according to the conceptual framework on storybooks and empathy published in Frontiers in Psychology. The story provides the context; the conversation around it provides the language.

Imagination and pretend play: the story doesn't end when the book closes

One of the less obvious gifts of a good story is what it leaves behind. According to the Child Mind Institute, pretend play typically emerges around ages two to three and grows more complex through the preschool years. Children who engage in more pretend play show stronger emotion knowledge and emotion regulation, and pretend play actively supports theory-of-mind development.

Stories feed this. ZERO TO THREE observes that children incorporate the experiences they have encountered — including what they have heard in books — into their pretend play, working through emotional scenarios in imaginative form. When a child picks up a stuffed animal the morning after a story and begins narrating its small adventure, they are not just playing. They are continuing to work through the emotional logic of what they imagined the night before.

The story does not end when the book closes. It continues in the imaginative life of a child who is still thinking about it.

It's the conversation, not just the words: how to read so it counts

There is a meaningful difference between reading at a child and reading with one. The approach that research consistently supports is called dialogic reading, developed by Whitehurst and colleagues for children ages two to six. Its three principles are simple: prompt your child to talk about what they see, respond with something that expands on what they said, and adjust to where they are developmentally.

A study in the Journal of Research in Innovative Teaching & Learning found that dialogic reading combined with direct instruction of emotion words increased emotion vocabulary knowledge in preschool-age children. Research published in Jurnal Pendidikan Progresif found that dialogic reading significantly improved emotional understanding scores in four- to six-year-old children, with gains sustained a week after the intervention.

The practical version of this looks like pausing at a picture and asking "what do you think she's feeling right now?" rather than reading straight through. It looks like responding to your child's guess — even a wrong one — with curiosity rather than correction. It looks like making the story a conversation rather than a performance.

Research on shared reading quality and brain activation, published in NIH PMC, found that higher-quality shared reading in preschool-age children was positively correlated with brain activation in left anterior regions supporting language (including Broca's area), executive function, and social-emotional processing. Quality, in that study, was defined largely through dialogic-reading behaviors.

The book is the invitation. What you do with it is the experience.

What this looks like across ages 0–6

These capacities do not arrive all at once. In infancy, the value is almost entirely relational — the warmth and rhythm of a familiar voice, the back-and-forth of gaze and attention. Somewhere in the second year, children begin to connect pictures to concepts and emotions to expressions. By ages three to four, when theory of mind begins to emerge, they are ready to engage with characters as having inner lives of their own. And through ages five and six, they can hold increasingly complex perspectives, follow a character through genuine conflict, and carry what they have read into their play and relationships.

Reach Out and Read, a pediatric program with over three decades of research behind it, has documented that reading aloud combined with play produces measurable social-emotional improvements in young children — including meaningful reductions in hyperactivity. These are not small or theoretical effects. They show up in children's bodies and behavior.

When the child sees themselves in the story

There is one thing that shifts the experience of a story in a particular way. When a child opens a book and finds their own face looking back as the character, the leap into another perspective starts from a place they already recognize as theirs. That small spark of recognition — the moment they register that this story is about someone who is them — tends to make every subsequent page more alive.

Estori creates illustrated stories in which a child's photo becomes the character: a genuinely unique story generated around their name, age, and the world the story takes them into. We think of it as the same imaginative work a parent has always done when they substitute their child's name into a story — just carried through every page, from the first illustration to the last line. One soft, consistent presence for a child to follow into whatever small adventure the night holds.

The story you keep returning to

There is no single bedtime book that builds empathy. It is the accumulation — night after night, conversation by conversation, the character who was scared and then wasn't, the one who lost something and found something else. The research is consistent on this: what matters is the relationship the reading happens inside, the quality of the conversation it opens, and the steadiness of the habit.

You do not need to optimize it. You just need to keep doing it.

That, as it turns out, is exactly enough.