What Are Story Stems?

We want to tell you about a trick.

Developmental psychologists have been using it for over thirty years. It works on 3-year-olds. It works on 10-year-olds. It tells you more about what a child is thinking and feeling than almost anything you could ask them directly.

And you've probably been doing it by accident. At bedtime. In your pyjamas.

The Trick

Give a child the beginning of a story. Just the setup and the problem. A family at a birthday party. A spill at dinner. A knock at the door.

Then stop. Right at the interesting part.

And say: "What happens next?"

That's it. That's a story stem. The technique was formalised in 1990 by developmental psychologist Inge Bretherton at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as part of the MacArthur Story Stem Battery.

What Comes Out

Here's the magic: children don't just make something up. They pour their real world in.

How the character handles the spill tells you how they handle mistakes. Whether the friend at the door is welcomed or feared tells you about trust. Whether the conflict ends in forgiveness, escape, or a dragon who eats the problem tells you about how they carry difficulty.

Two hundred studies. Thirty years. Psychology, education, social work. A comprehensive review by Kelly and Bailey at UCLA confirmed the pattern: "What happens next?" gets further than "How are you feeling?" with a young child.

(This will not surprise anyone who has tried asking a 4-year-old how they're feeling. The answer is usually "purple.")

And You Already Do This

Every time you pause a bedtime story and ask "What do you think happens next?" - that's the same principle. Same technique. Same magic. You don't need dolls. You don't need a lab. You just need a story and a pause.

Listen to what they say. There's no right answer. But the patterns tell you something.

Some answers parents have shared: "A place where socks go when they disappear." "A hospital for tired parents." (Ouch.) "A cake planet, but the cakes are angry."

How Naniby Uses This

Every Naniby story is built around a story stem. A beginning designed with child development specialists that creates space for a dilemma, a choice, a moment where the child gets to decide what kind of world this is. The framework is thirty years old. The banana is brand new.