"Parenting starts with a story:

My grandma, worried that her 3-year son had not spoken a word yet, had him chase down a grasshopper. Diligently, without complaint, the boy did and returned with a smile. Open she said; confused but with hesitation, he opened wide. Wide. She shoved it in and closed his mouth. Hablas, mijo, hablas. He spit it out crying. Crying and yelling. He has not stopped either since she says and smiles thinking of her now 50 year old son talking his time away in a New Mexican state penitentiary.

This is my father. He smiles when he tells this story now on a snowy day to my children in his trailer on the outskirts of town. He has been out of jail for a year now. My kids look to me for guidance. Do we believe? I can only smile. Teasing, my father says, ‘what mija you don’t believe me? Come here I’ll tell you more.’

I realize this is so central to my parenting. Stories. But I did not know this when I became a father. I didn’t know those afternoons or early mornings when my partner had to leave to culinary school and I had to discover what to do for the next eight hours that I was talking to both my newborn son and myself. I was showing us they way. I was imagining the path home. Telling myself, telling my son that success is possible, that despite my fear, my ignorance, my loneliness this path was traversable. It’s the stories that we tell each other that create connections, that foster empathy, that teach.

But we aren’t the only ones telling tales. I see now how storytelling works in a cultural, social level as well; how myths of capitalism, christianity, patriarchy are told over and over and over until our kids tell them back to each other while at play, to their teachers in their homework, to us if we listen during those tucking ins at bed time or in the quite hours when we wake up together in our bed. This is linguistic terrorism. I have also come to see how it’s our cultural stories that impact our kids more than any one thing can, more than parents, more than teachers."
http://daddy-dialectic.blogspot.com/2006/06/what-i-do.html