Does It Count as Reading When Dadi Tells the Story Instead of a Book?

Your five-year-old is narrating the bit where Hanuman grows giant enough to leap across the ocean to Lanka — complete with sound effects, a dramatic pause, and a correction when you try to skip ahead ("no, Dadi says he picked up a mountain first"). They know this story cold. They've never once opened a book to it.

And somewhere in the back of your head, a small, specific worry surfaces: is this actually reading? Or is my child just collecting stories by ear, while the actual skill — sitting with a book, following print, building the habit everyone keeps telling me matters — quietly isn't happening?

It's a fair question to sit with for a second, because it doesn't get asked out loud much. Nobody doubts that a grandparent narrating the Panchatantra or a Krishna story at bedtime is lovely. The doubt is quieter than that — it's whether it counts, the way time with an actual book is assumed to count.

What's actually happening when Dadi tells the story

Turns out the doubt rests on a narrower idea of "reading" than the research supports. Comprehension — the thing we're all actually trying to build — isn't primarily about decoding print. It's about following a sequence of events, holding characters and their motives in mind, predicting what happens next, and understanding cause and effect inside a story. That's exactly the muscle a child flexes every time they listen to, and then retell, the story of Hanuman crossing the ocean or the crow and the pitcher of water.

There's real longitudinal evidence behind this. Selma Babayiğit and colleagues followed 716 children for nine years as part of a long-running UK study, and found that a child's narrative skill at age five — their ability to understand and construct a story, with no print involved — went on to predict reading comprehension at age ten and reading achievement at fourteen, even after accounting for general cognitive ability, memory, and the mother's own education. The story itself was doing the work, years before the book was.

More recently, a 2024 study published in npj Science of Learning measured how connected and well-structured young children's spoken stories were, then tracked the same children three months later. The kids whose spoken narratives held together more tightly went on to do better on reading comprehension and phonological awareness tasks — a short gap, but a real one, and the researchers found it held independent of general intelligence.

Neither study is about grandparents or about India specifically — it's worth saying that plainly rather than stretching the evidence. But there's no reason the mechanism would stop working just because the storyteller is Dadi instead of a researcher's test script. If anything, India has run this experiment longer than almost anywhere else. The Ramayana, the Jataka tales, the Panchatantra survived for centuries with no printing press involved at all, carried purely by people telling them to other people. A 2022 study out of St. Joseph's College in Bengaluru interviewed elders across Karnataka about exactly this kind of storytelling, and — while its focus was more on values and behaviour than reading scores specifically — it's a reminder that oral tradition in Indian homes is still a living, serious thing, not a relic standing in for "real" literacy.

So nothing needs fixing — but here's a nice small thing to try

None of this means the book is irrelevant, or that you should quietly worry in the other direction either. The two aren't competing for the same slot. A nice, low-effort way to let them meet: a few days after your child has heard a story out loud — not instead of the telling, and definitely not announced as a lesson — hand them the same story in a book. With a five-year-old who's just heard the Hanuman story from a grandparent, something like Amma Tell Me About Hanuman or Amma Tell Me About Ramayan works well specifically because the story is already familiar — the child isn't decoding something new, they're meeting an old friend on the page, which tends to feel like a reunion rather than homework. The grandparent's telling isn't being replaced or corrected; it's just getting a second home.

If you want the fuller picture of what a reading habit actually looks like at different ages — because five looks very different from eight, and both are fine — we've put together a full guide covering every stage from 0 to 12. And if this particular worry sounded familiar, you might also like what we've written about why story time with Nani, Nana, and Dadi-Dada counts as real reading time, why it's genuinely fine that everyone in a joint family tells the story a little differently, and — if Navratri or Dussehra is coming up in your house — turning the festival season into family reading time.

If you're curious what might actually land well on the page for your own five-year-old who already knows their mythology by heart, our free 2-minute reading assessment is a quick, no-pressure way to find out — just tell us a bit about your reader, and we'll take it from there.