Storyful Parent - My Story

My Story

Hi! I am Devaki. Mother. Engineer. Storyteller. Storyful Parent of two.

For 12 years, I designed story curriculum, founded and scaled Little Readers' Nook, a reading and storytelling programme for children, to 75 centres across 25 cities, and trained over 100 women to run them.

As a professional storyteller, 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 try to decode the stories I tell. 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.

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 realisation changed the direction of my work. The story was never really the point. What happened around it was.

This is my journey.

A home full of stories

I grew up on a steady diet of stories. My parents and my aunt told me a story 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 early stories were building something steady 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.

This inner world would shape my life in ways I did not know yet.

The year I found my voice

Much later, I landed in a new school in a new country. And I struggled to fit in. I was mocked. Shunned. 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. And I found the outside 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

Ever since I remember, I intensely disliked being told what to do.

"Why?" I would ask. "Because we say so," I was told. It was said with love. But finality. It was the only way of parenting that my parents' 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 then. I rebelled because I was handed the conclusion and asked to skip the journey. That one regret sits behind everything I teach now.

Why I turned to parents

For years I taught both parents and teachers. To tell stories well. To skip the moral. Ask questions. Listen.

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. I detest those words, yet they remain as the voice in my head.

That is when it became clear. A parent is the deepest influence a child will ever have. 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 happening beyond our classroom. At home, in how a parent lived and spoke and responded on an ordinary evening with the family.

That is when I decided to stop trying to reach the child through a class. By then we had grown to seventy five centres. I had trained over a hundred women and spent twelve years building Little Readers' Nook. I closed it all in 2024, and turned to the one person who was already shaping the children. The parent.

When we are not 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 small 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 to tell tonight.

Story Samvad shows you what to do with them. The slower, deeper work of becoming the kind of parent a child learns from.

I am still learning it myself. We can learn together. That is rather the point.

Curious how this philosophy looks in real life? Read Samvad in Action

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