Storyful Parent - My Story

Storyful Parent

Start with our ancient stories.

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The little ones giggle. Older children think. A rooted inner voice grows.

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My Story

Hi! I am Devaki. A mother. And a storyteller.

For twelve years, from 2012 to 2024, I ran Little Readers' Nook, a reading and storytelling programme for children. I trained women to run it, and designed a story-centric curriculum. At its peak we had seventy five centres across the country, and a few abroad run by expat Indian mothers carrying their stories with them.

I have also told stories to thousands of children, in schools and at literature festivals, a hall full of children laughing and leaning in. It was a thrill like little else. And still, somewhere, it did not satisfy me.

I have never been able to just tell a story and leave it there. I always tried to decode the stories I told. What happened inside a child at the moment a story landed. Which turn, which line, made them go still. Why some tellings changed something, and others slid past. Perhaps that is the engineer in me. I take the things that look like magic and I ask how they are built.

The more I looked, the more I found that the big hall was never where the real magic happened for me.

A handful of children, gathered close, talking about the story we had just shared. That moment when a story changed something in even one child. That one quiet shift was worth more to me than a hall full of applause. This one realisation changed everything for me. The story was never really the point. What happened around it was.

This is my story.

A home full of stories

I grew up in a home full of stories.

My parents and my aunt told me one every single day. I would not eat without it. Not one bite. They tried once, just to see what would happen. I sat in front of my plate, arms folded, and waited them out.

I did not know it then, but those stories were building something in me. A world of my own, rich and quiet. Where I could wonder and feel and think, with no one telling me what to do.

The year I found my voice

Much later, I landed in a new school in a new country, where I did not fit in at all.

I was mocked. Ignored. That year taught me something I have carried ever since. The world outside can label you. It can decide who you are before you open your mouth. But what truly matters is what you know about yourself.

That year, I reached within myself, to the world stories had built for me. I found the world’s labels could not reach the one place that mattered.

I did not have a word for it then. I do now.

Rooted. In your own values. In your own inner voice. In who you really are.

Because we say so

I was also a child who intensely disliked being told what to do.

"Why?" I would ask. "Because we say so," I was told.

Said with love. But finality. It was the only way of parenting that generation knew. But it asked me to obey without understanding. So I rebelled.

Now here is the strange part. Today, in my forties, I find myself living by many of the very values my parents tried to give me then. They were never wrong. But I could not hear them back then. Because I was handed the conclusion and asked to skip the journey.

That one regret sits behind everything I teach now.

Why parents

For years I taught both parents and teachers. And I told them both to skip the moral. Ask questions. Listen. Don't tell.

And yet, sometimes, when I speak to my own children in unguarded moments, I hear my parents speaking through me.

"Because I say so…” Their words out of my mouth. Even as I detested those words, they remained as the voice in my head.

That is when it became clear. A parent is the deepest influence a child will ever have. Not the loudest. Not always the most intentional. But the deepest, and the most unseen. No teacher gets in as early, as close, or stays as long.

All those years I had spent bringing stories to children in classes, the real shaping was not happening in our classroom. It was happening at home, in how a parent lived and spoke and responded on an ordinary evening with the family.

That's when I decided to stop trying to reach the child through a class. I shut down Little Readers' Nook. And I turned to the person who was already shaping the children. Their parents.

When we are no longer in the room

This is the deepest fear of every parent.

We want our children to be safe and happy. Always. We watch, we guide, we step in. And then one day they walk into a world we cannot follow them into. A playdate. A classroom. An argument we never see. A choice they make when we are nowhere near.

What happens then?

This is the question I sat with for a long time. We cannot be in every room. We cannot make every decision for our children. The only thing that travels with a child, into all the rooms we will never enter, is the voice inside their own head. If that voice is rooted, if it knows their own feelings and values, if it has learned to pause and wonder and think before it acts, then they are not alone. They carry something steady. They carry, in a way, us.

Stories build that voice. Not in a day. Over hundreds of tellings, slowly, the way my own was built without anyone planning it.

And that is why Storyful Parent

Story Kosh gives you the stories. Story Samvad shows you what to do with them.

One is where you begin tonight. The other is the slower, deeper work of becoming the kind of parent a child learns from. Not by being told, but by watching, and wondering, alongside you.

I am still learning it myself. That is rather the point.

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