Friendship stories

Friendship trouble is rarely general. Something happened at school, and the useful story is the one that happens to match it.

Nobody would play with them

The Birds, the Beasts, and the Bat is about a creature who fits neither group, and takes seven gentle minutes. The Bull and the Goat makes the difference between two animals the reason they end up together.

A friend was unkind, or unfair

The Fox and the Stork, six minutes, is the classic tit-for-tat about a dinner served in the wrong dish. The Hare with Many Friends asks the harder question underneath it: what is a friend who is never there when you need one?

They were the unkind one

The Devoted Friend, six minutes, shows generosity being taken advantage of, and lets a child notice the pattern without anyone naming them. It is a better conversation starter than any question you could ask directly.

A recurring shape in this theme is two characters who start out frightened of each other. Huffy Puffy Wolf spends nine calm minutes turning the wolf into somebody worth understanding. The Dragon Tamers does the same with a dragon, in seven.

These are useful for the child who has decided somebody in their class is horrible. They do not argue the point. They simply show the misunderstanding coming apart, which is much harder to resist than a parent’s reasoning.

If friendship is too broad for tonight, the theme divides.

• Kindness, 91 stories, is the largest: small good deeds that turn out to matter.
• Love, 56 stories, covers love in every form, including the kind that is not romantic at all.
• Belonging is a tight shelf of nine about fitting in and not fitting in.
• Mice is four stories, and children who love mice really do love mice.

For the feeling rather than the friendship, stories about feelings gathers the same material by emotion.

Most nights the story is enough on its own. A child does not need to be asked what they learned; they will have taken what they needed, and the question turns a pleasure into homework.

When you do want to open something up, the trick is to talk about the characters rather than your child. The City Mouse and the Country Mouse is particularly good for this, because both mice are right and neither has to lose. Our guide on how stories teach empathy explains why reading about a falling-out works when a lecture about one does not.

The other repeated shape here is the mismatched team: creatures with nothing in common who get somewhere precisely because of it. These are the ones to read to a child who has decided they only like people exactly like them.

Four unlikely groups

• Long, Broad and Sharpsight, seven minutes, in which three absurd talents turn out to be the only three that were needed.
• The Dolphins, the Whales, and the Sprat, five minutes, where the smallest fish settles the argument.
• The Lion and the Fox, eight minutes: strength and cunning, neither of which works alone.
• The Great White Bear and the Trolls, six minutes, for the child who would rather out-think a problem than fight it.

What these four share is that nobody changes to fit in. The sprat stays a sprat and the fox stays a fox, and the alliance works because of the difference rather than in spite of it. That is a more useful thing for a child to hear than an instruction to get along with everybody, and it is the reason this shape has survived in folk tales for so long.