Using storytelling to develop empathy

Ask any teacher what quality they most want to develop in their students, and empathy will be near the top of the list every time. The ability to understand how another person feels — to genuinely inhabit another perspective, even briefly — is foundational not just to kindness, but to learning, to communication, and to living well alongside other people.

And yet empathy can be surprisingly difficult to teach directly. You can tell a child to consider other people’s feelings, but telling isn’t the same as experiencing. What children need is practice — repeated, low-stakes opportunities to step into someone else’s shoes and see the world from a different vantage point. That’s exactly what storytelling, and particularly dramatic storytelling, provides.

Why stories work

There’s a growing body of research showing that reading fiction — and even more so, engaging in dramatic play — genuinely develops empathetic capacity. One often-cited study found that children who engaged regularly in imaginative play showed significantly stronger theory of mind skills (the ability to understand that other people have thoughts, feelings, and perspectives different from their own) than children who didn’t.

The reason isn’t mysterious. When you follow a story, you’re required to track multiple characters’ inner states simultaneously. You’re asking yourself: what does this character want? Why are they upset? What would I do in their position? How does this situation look to them, compared to how it looks to me? These are empathy questions, and answering them — even in a fictional context — exercises exactly the same mental muscles as empathy in real life.

Stories also provide what real life often can’t: safe distance. A person, particularly children, who has experienced conflict or loss may find it difficult to discuss those experiences directly. But they may be perfectly willing to explore similar themes through a character in a story, at one remove. That protective fiction can be enormously valuable — and a skilled parent or teacher can use it as a bridge to deeper conversations.

The particular power of dramatic storytelling

Reading stories to children is wonderful. Reading with them is better. But dramatic storytelling — where children actively take on roles, voice characters, and make choices about how a story unfolds — is in a category of its own when it comes to developing empathy.

When an actor voices a character, they’re not just following that character’s journey from the outside. They’re making active choices about how that character feels, how they speak, what motivates them. This requires a level of imaginative investment that passive story consumption simply doesn’t. You can observe a character’s sadness from the outside; you have to understand it from the inside if you’re going to portray it convincingly.

This is why drama teachers have long known that acting exercises are among the most powerful tools available for developing emotional intelligence in young people. You don’t have to be training for the West End for this to work — even the simplest dramatic play, with a couple of characters and a basic scenario, sets these processes in motion.

How tabletop theatre fits in

Tabletop theatre is a particularly accessible form of dramatic storytelling for families. It doesn’t require a stage, a costume cupboard, or a crowd of children. It requires a table, a theatre, some characters, and a story — and the participants themselves do the rest.

What makes it especially effective for developing empathy is the combination of physical and imaginative engagement. When you move a character across the stage and speaking their lines you simultaneously think about that character’s physical presence in space, their emotional state, and their relationship to the other characters around them. This multi-layered engagement produces a kind of understanding that simply reading or watching can’t.

There’s also the element of choice. In a tabletop theatre, you don’t have to follow the script. They can direct the story, change what happens, make different decisions for their characters. “What if this character didn’t run away? What if they stayed and talked instead?” These kinds of questions, explored through play, are some of the most valuable conversations you can have about empathy and moral reasoning.

Stories that stretch empathy

Not all stories exercise empathy equally well. The most effective are those that present characters with genuine moral complexity — people who aren’t simply good or simply bad, but who are doing their best in difficult circumstances, or who have understandable reasons for the choices they make.

This is one reason why Shakespeare is so valuable, even for younger audiences. His characters are rarely straightforward. Much Ado About Nothing, for example, gives us Benedick and Beatrice, who use wit as a defence against vulnerability; and Hero and Claudio, whose story turns on a terrible misunderstanding and the consequences of acting on incomplete information. These are deeply human situations, and exploring them — even through the intermediary of a miniature stage — can spark genuinely meaningful reflection.

Classic adventure stories like Treasure Island offer different empathy opportunities: the chance to explore courage, loyalty, and moral ambiguity through a fast-moving, exciting narrative that children find naturally compelling. Long John Silver, in particular, is one of literature’s great morally complex characters — charming, dangerous, and not easily categorised as simply a villain.

Practical ideas for parents

You don’t need to be a drama teacher to use storytelling to develop your student’s empathy. Here are a few simple approaches that work well with a tabletop theatre:

Pause the story at a moment of conflict and ask: “How do you think this character is feeling right now? Why?” Then ask the same question about the character on the other side of the conflict. This simple exercise — holding two perspectives at once — is a fundamental empathy skill.

Invite your student to give a “villain” character an understandable motivation. What might have happened to make them this way? What do they want, and why? This doesn’t mean excusing bad behaviour — it means understanding it, which is the beginning of wisdom.

After the play, talk about the story as if it were real. “If you were Hero, how would you have felt when Claudio accused you in front of everyone?” This kind of reflective conversation, grounded in shared dramatic experience, is one of the most natural and effective ways to develop emotional intelligence.

Discover Create Theatre

At Create Theatre, we believe in the power of stories to change how people understand the world. Our handcrafted tabletop theatres bring classic plays to life in a form that invites participation, imagination, and the kind of deep engagement that develops genuine empathy.

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