Listen up: why listening to stories still matters for kids of all ages

This is one of a series of essays commissioned to commemorate RNZ's 100 years on air in Aotearoa.

A weekday evening in the mid-1980s. I was teaching a night class at Inglewood High School in Taranaki. ''How to Write For Kids'' I'd called it in my arrogance, so it served me right that I'd recently received a gently-phrased rejection from The School Journal.

But it was a different market I intended to tell my class about. My week's mail also included a letter from RNZ producer Prue Langbein. They were starting a children's programme that they planned to call Ears, and invited writers to submit stories.

While my writing class were excited and energised at the prospect of a new outlet, I was calmly confident. Since the RNZ letter indicated that Ears was aiming particularly at really young listeners, I chose really short stories. I stuck four in an envelope, sent them away, and awaited the breathless thanks.

Check out Storytime, RNZ's collection of audio books, stories and music for kids of all ages, or listen to the Best of Storytime podcast.

About 10 days later, all four came back. With them was a courteous note from Prue, indicating they needed more substantial, more textured narratives, ones to grab young listeners and hold them for up to 10 minutes.

I reacted in the way I always react to rejections. I sulked. I vowed to punish Ears by never ever sending them another submission. A couple of days later, I settled down and began to write a story that took Prue's excellent suggestions on board.

RNZ has been broadcasting content for kids since the 1920s, funded first by the Public Licence Fee, then from 2000 by direct government support. There were The Correspondence School and Broadcast to Schools. When polio epidemics closed schools, the NZBC (as it was) took over, with a whole curriculum of online lessons. Meanwhile, a range of''Uncles.... Aunties.... Brothers....'' fronted fiction readings for young listeners. In Robert Lord's 1992 play, Joyful and Triumphant, there's a scene where protagonist Rose listens delightedly to a Christmas Day broadcast of her 'Percy Piwakawaka' stories. A couple of decades later, she's lamenting how nobody wants to hear about anthropomorphic fantails any longer.

Ears was proudly local, in content and contributors, with A-list local writers like Margaret Mahy, Joy Cowley and Apirana Taylor. Just as important for the NZ lit world were the newer authors, like those in my evening class, who wrote, submitted, were often accepted, shared Rose's delight in hearing their words out in the world. Ears became a launch pad for numerous Kiwi names.

The programme brought our stories to our listeners, without trappings of piwakawaka or pohutukawa. We got our suburbs and schools; our idioms and intonations, seasons and settings. Tangi, Diwali, Chinese New Year happened. Friends were called Mere, Alofa, Mei Lei. Grannie and Kuia and Kui Fefine all featured. So did te reo, frequently and naturally.

The best of its narratives affirmed the freedom of being young, while respecting other generations. They were mischievous, nicely subversive, jumped with jokes and humour. Ears wasn't alone. The same decade saw Grampa's Place, 15 daily minutes on air where stories and songs and sometimes Marxian wordplay (Groucho, not Karl), delivered by Des Kelly and Rochelle Brader as grumpy oldster and eager granddaughter were all assembled by producer Ruth Corrin.

Both programmes were empowering. They inferred (they never preached; kids have the inbuilt bullshit detector that Ernest Hemingway reckoned all writers needed) that young people can get through tough times. They never sugar-coated difficulties, and they always made sure the narrative came first. This was a story, not a sermon.

On Ears, you might hear work involving death, bullying, racism. Loneliness, bad choices, family ruptures might be touched on. In the same stories, there could be awful puns and gloriously mordant humour (Toby: ''I'm so sorry your cat died. Would you like another one just the same?''Trudy: ''What am I supposed to do with two dead cats?'') I remember falling about at that, while six-year-old grandson Patrick gazed at me tolerantly.

Around the same time, Grampa's Place had a series of meticulously-checked stories about inappropriate touching and sexual predation. Some adults complained; more adults congratulated. I never object to parents or other big persons expressing disapproval; it shows they're taking notice of, are involved in what their children are reading / seeing / hearing.

I acknowledge that we all feel the wish to preserve kids in a sort of pre-lapsarian Eden, where nothing harmful can come near. Trouble is, such protection can start leading towards censorship, and if you write for children, you're particularly liable to reproach from outraged adults.

A while back, RNZ serialised a young adult novel of mine, in which there's a scene where a teenage girl's boyfriend touches her breasts. In The Listener a week or so later, a parent made it clear I was advocating sexual promiscuity. ''I turned the radio off instantly, and my daughter won't be listening to any more of that rubbish.''Pity – if he'd let the episode play for a few more seconds, he'd have heard the girl push the boy away, and say that she'd decide how she wanted to be treated; that she was in charge of her own sexuality.

Anyway, the stories I've mentioned from Ears and Grampa's Place implied that ugly things could happen, and that it wasn't the child's ''fault'' in any way (so important; many victims grow up worrying that they were somehow to blame). The events were indeed upsetting, but young people could handle them and survive them. I still hold that broadcasting such narratives is an example of how a national radio network can help a nation.

''Children's stories are not luxuries,'' wrote the UK's Katherine Rundell. ''They are fundamental to our culture, to the grownups we become, the society we build.''

Absolutely. Kids who read for themselves or who are read to, meet words. Words empower. I remember the 20-ish All Blacks supporter interviewed after our rugby team yet again failed to win the World Cup. ''Oh, mate,'' he went. ''Words can't express how I feel, mate.'' Well, (mate), I thought at the time, if you'd read more when you were a kid, you'd have more words to express those feelings, and to handle them better.

Because words promote understanding – of oneself and others. The words of stories extend imagination, take us out into the minds of others and deep into our own. They develop sympathy, give us the skills to interpret, understand, recognise. Neuroscientists have established that reading or being read to stimulates areas of the brain that no other activity seems to reach.

I remember from my high school teaching days the equation between limited literacy and behavioural problems: the teenagers who, if they found themselves in a confrontation or misunderstanding, lacked the vocabulary to explain themselves. That led to frustration, which sometimes led to violence, verbal or even physical.

Reading and being read to brings still more pluses. It gives you new perspectives, makes the world more comprehensible and manageable.(''Life says: she did this,'' Julian Barnes declared. ''Stories say: she did this because....''). It develops self-reliance; builds an inner self into which you can retire. E M Forster spoke of ''the measureless content'' he felt whenever he opened a Jane Austen novel. Every reader knows the stimulation, even transfiguration that a story can bring.

I've heard people worry about their kids always being ''stuck in a book''. The implication is that reading is somehow passive; that physical pastimes are more healthy. Nonsense: when you're reading, your brain is busy, busy, busy. Studies show that pulse, heart-rate, even blood pressure are affected. I won't speculate which texts work on the blood pressure.

I believe that Ears and Grampa's Place brought all the above benefits to their listeners. They helped with other skills as well. Children's television does include quality programmes. But on even the best TV, images and associations are pre-determined; the programme defines and therefore limits. There's little room left for the viewer's imagination.

Radio, by contrast, enourages, even demands that the listener plays a part, decides what characters look like, what their streets and homes and environment are. It's a participatory medium.

Listening also encourages quiet – which may seem strange when words – and SFX of heavy breathing – are coming at you. But haven't we all exhorted our children ''Be quiet and listen!''. When you're hearing a story, the world around steps back; you're enveloped in silence. In these decades of visual and auditory distraction, such silence is a rare and precious gift.

David Hill is a writer living in Taranaki.