You Don't Need AI. You Can Just Tell Your Kids Stories

On the virtue of bedtime stories and how to tell them

Photo by Katherine Hanlon on Unsplash

I am not a model father. I have made a number of mistakes for which I have apologized to my children and I have many regrets I live with. But there are a few parenting decisions I will always look back on with pride and joy. And one of them was the decision to tell my children bedtime stories. Not just read to them—which is wonderful and something I still do, but tell them stories I made up on the spot. From the time they were toddlers struggling to fall asleep I would make up stories involving them and their stuffed animals or our pets going on adventures. So as you can imagine, I was more than a bit disheartened to learn yesterday that there are a number of free A.I. sites that offer “personalized” bedtime stories for children. Let me encourage young parents: You can just tell your children stories. They won’t care if your plot doesn’t make sense. They won’t care if your story has a ridiculous ending. In fact, they’ll probably like it more if it does! Just please tell your children stories. It’s one of the must humanizing and loving things you can do as a parent. It will fill their imagination with wonder and teach them to cultivate their own stories. And they will remember it for the rest of their lives.

Having spent probably hundreds of hours over many years lying on the floor telling stories to my children, I have some ideas about how to tell interesting stories. So if you are afraid or daunted by the prospect, read this and give it a try. Don’t rely on A.I. to tell your children stories when you can do it yourself.

In my experience, the biggest challenge to telling bedtime stories is the difficulty of making up a plot and dialogue and characters. This is where A.I. is offering to save you time and effort. Don’t buy it. You can do this.

Begin by letting go of your idealism. In your mind, a good story should sound like Tolkien or Lewis or they aren’t worth telling. The reality is that your children just want to hear you tell them a story. So let that go. Over time, with practice, your stories will get good. Just start by doing.

Next, I found it very helpful to close my eyes so I could concentrate on the world I was painting rather than what was going on around me. If your kids get squirrely in bed, don’t worry. In my experience, most kids calm down once you get into the story. So you can relax and focus on the world in your head. Closing your eyes also helps you lose self-consciousness. If you are too conscious of yourself telling a story you can get self-critical and then you can get hung up on dialogue or plot points.

Use stories you know to come up with basic plot points. You know good stories. And all good stories are made up of other stories, as Cormac McCarthy said (paraphrased). So take from stories and make up an interesting plot. For example, one story I told my kids was a Sci-Fi story about two kids who were raised inside a building which they slowly discover is just one level of a giant spaceship in a giant fleet. I heard this basic plot twist in an old 1950s radio drama once. My kids loved it.

Tell continuing stories. That spaceship story took months to tell. Every night was a new episode. And they were excited, every night.

Use voices for each character. Kids love voices. And they don’t care if your accents are goofy. To them, it’s all golden.

Relax and allow the story to unfold in your mind as you are speaking. If you think you aren’t imaginative enough, you’re probably just being too self-conscious and too caught up in the adult world. Let go of your adult worries for 15 minutes. Allow yourself to slip back into your child mind of utter play and just imagine what characters would say in a situation. Imagine what might happen to them.

Knowing your kids and their interests, think about the kinds of things that they would like in the story. For example, I once told a story about a bunk-bed that floated on the ocean because my kids were sleeping on a bunk-bed at that time. For a time I told continuing adventures of Willy Wonka (something I doubt A.I. can do, due to IP issues). My youngest loves cats, so I told a story about Cat Town. The beauty of it is that as you are telling the story you can introduce elements of your child’s passions and interests.

Without being too heavy handed, you can also teach them a few things about morality, honor, courage, and God. I mention this last because I think the most important thing in these bedtime stories is wonder and imagination, not moral lessons. There are other times and other stories that serve those purposes. But when you are drifting off to sleep, it’s nice to fill your mind with stories of wonder and adventure (Ex. I read Batman and Star Wars comics myself before bed).

What all of this amounts to is that you are giving of yourself for your children. They will cherish these moments and you will cherish these moments. My kids are older now and I no longer tell them bedtime stories, although I still read to my youngest, and I miss those times. What I hate is the idea of people turning to A.I. to fill this role. There’s no good reason for it nine times out of ten. Yes, you’re tired. Yes, it’s another thing to do. But it’s a lovely thing to do. A wonderful thing to do. A human thing to do: To tell stories. What you will be teaching your children is that it is good to use your imagination. And you may even find that they start telling each other stories, too.