Self-regulation through storytelling: A demonstration study detailing the educational book Game On for resilience building in early school children

Abstract

Resilience to cope with setbacks has acquired a prominent place within Australia’s school curricula. One core component of resilience is children’s capacity to resolve conflict. Conflict resolution is the ability to regulate emotions, understand your temperament, and solve problems. This article demonstrates how a storytelling book, titled Game On, helps early school children understand their temperament and regulate their feelings. Using qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with teachers and sport deployment officers, as well as structured focus groups with children aged 4–7, this case-study evaluated the participants’ perspectives of Game On to improve self-regulation and stress control in young children. It demonstrates that teaching self-regulation through storytelling at an early age has the potential to equip young children with strategies of coping with normative stress. Such strategies include regulating or altering one’s psychological state or behaviour, and voluntarily inhibiting, activating and changing attention or behaviour through self-authored responses.