Use Stories To Promote Children’s Mental Health

Story is an important medium for young children to understand the world, to recognize things and to express their emotions. Listening and reading stories is not only necessary for young children’s life, but also an important way to promote their mental health. If the structure of a story is similar to children’s psychological state, then they will have the opportunity to be able to express their feelings of morbid hope, fears and defense system safely through the non-conscious metaphor under the tutor’s encouragement and guidance. At the same time, the tutor can help them analyze the ideas and behaviors of themselves and others. By providing the necessary information of solving problems, the tutor can promote young children’s thinking and help them develop positive mental qualities, such as friendly, courage, wisdom, perseverance and positive interpersonal relation. In the meantime, the tutor should increase the application of these positive qualities in the daily life of the young children.The author finds a fact that the theoretical research on using stories to affect young children’s personality, emotion, language and so on at present domestic, is not much and lack of theory to guide practice by retrieving the related literature at home and abroad. On this basis, this paper combines theories and practice of early childhood education as a foundation to build a bridge to make the theory into operational behaviors, so that the practice of education in kindergarten can play a role in the healthy growth of young children.This research adopts the questionnaire method, interview method, observation method, analysis method, to eight young children scored higher in behavior problems, giving them a four-month story intervention, each intervention time is about 45 minutes. Four months after the intervention, compared with the other eight young children that do not participate in the story intervention, the former eight young children become better than before, and they are also improved in the depression, social withdrawal, hyperactivity, and indiscipline(P<.05). While the control group doesn’t have obvious changes in the scoring of movement scale, no significant improvement in one certain factor(P>.05). Young children’s improvement is not only reflected in the scores of the scale change, but also in social interaction and confidence said by parents and teachers, while in the interactive story counseling, the positive factors are also increasing, and the negative reactions are being reduced. The research proves that the story intervention in the young children’s problem behavior and cultivating the positive psychological quality of the children is feasible.