Healing Stories for Challenging Behaviour

"'Susan Perrow's inspirational adventures with storytelling have grown into this inspiring book. May its pages encourage you to speak healing words that help both children and adults to flourish. Her wisdom, imagination and generosity will kindle the joy and healing power of storytelling in you.' Nancy Mellon, author of Storytelling with Children" --Nancy Mellon, author of Storytelling with Children

Working with both modern and traditional tales, and many personal stories, the following chapters offer imaginative possibilities for transforming problematic behaviour and situations with young children. They also provide teachers, parents, childcare workers and child therapists with a range of skills to create stories that address challenging behaviour.

Included in the text are eighty stories divided into different behaviour categories for easy reference - to work with directly, adapt or use as models for creating your own tales. Brief notes precede each story, with an age guide and suggestions for use. The categories cover many kinds of commonly identified challenging behaviour, from dishonesty through laziness to teasing and bullying; everyday situations like `tidy-up time'; experiences such as `moving house'; or problems and difficulties such as `separation anxiety', `fear and nightmares' and `illness and grieving'. The range of selected stories and ideas are suitable for ages three to eight.

If you feel inspired to write your own therapeutic tales, the text provides a story-making model - a threefold framework of `Metaphor', `Journey' and `Resolution' - to guide you.

Beside this framework, the book has chapters on age-appropriate stories, multicultural perspectives, props and presentation aids, and guidelines for the telling of stories. It is my hope, with some help from these sections, that you will feel encouraged to write and tell your own stories, and so perpetuate and develop age-old story traditions.

Susan Perrow is a story-loving Australian with twenty-two years in early childhood work (teaching three- to eight-year-olds), teacher training, storytelling, storywriting, and course facilitating. She is also a mother of three adult sons. For the past eight years, she has worked in early childhood teacher training in Australia, Kenya, and South Africa; developed a 150 hour unit on Storytelling for Southern Cross University (NSW, Australia); and completed masters degree research on cross-cultural storytelling (post-apartheid South Africa).