Why won’t my kid settle for bedtime? Try custom stories where your kid is the hero
It’s 8:12 PM, and I’m kneeling on my kids’ bedroom floor picking up half a bucket of plastic dinosaur bones that my 4-year-old dumped out ten minutes after we started bedtime routine. My 6-year-old is already on her third request for a new glass of water, my partner is stuck at a late work meeting, and the only picture books left within arm’s reach are the two we’ve read so many times the pages are falling out.
My phone buzzes in my sweatpants pocket. It’s Jake, a dad of three boys I’ve known since college, who’s always messing around with coding projects in his spare time after his kids go to bed. “Built something new,” his text says. “Writes bedtime stories where your kids are the main characters. Free 2-week beta, no credit card, just tell me what breaks if you test it.”
I’m skeptical. I’ve tried half a dozen bedtime tools, most of them are just loud cartoons that get the kids more wound up, or free generic stories that bore them after two minutes. But I’m tired, I don’t have the brain space to make up a story from scratch like I sometimes do, so I open the link. It asks for the kids’ names, what their favorite things are, what kind of adventure they want. I type in Lila (6, loves horses and rescuing stray cats) and Jax (4, loves garbage trucks and digging up bones), hit “generate story,” and 12 seconds later I’ve got a 10-minute story about the two of them finding a lost kitten stuck in an oak tree at the farm we visited last month. Lila rides her favorite pony to the tree, Jax brings his blue-wheeled garbage truck to lift them up high enough to reach the branch.
I start reading out loud, and both kids go quiet. They stop climbing on the bed frame, Lila forgets all about that third glass of water. Halfway through, Lila interrupts me, leaning in so her forehead almost touches the phone: “That’s my pony! That’s the one I got a carrot for at the farm!” Jax yells so loud the dog wakes up from his nap by the door: “MY GARBAGE TRUCK HAS BLUE WHEELS!” It’s not a fancy, perfectly written story. There’s one awkward sentence where it says the kitten purred “very nicely” that I stumble over, but neither of them cares. They’re holding onto every word.
After that, I started testing it on the nights when bedtime feels like a losing battle, which is most nights after a busy day at school or the playground. I’ve been thinking a lot about why it works so much better than the regular books we love, even the good ones. When I worked as a preschool aide a few years back, I learned that kids between 3 and 8 don’t connect to stories the way adults do. They don’t care about a complex plot or beautiful prose as much as they care about seeing themselves in what you’re reading. This is just how their brains develop right now—they’re building their sense of who they are, so anything that has their name, their favorite toy, their actual hobby is going to stick way more than a story about a stranger princess or a generic superhero.
The thing is, most of us don’t have time to make up these custom stories every night. I’ve tried it before, and halfway through I’ll zone out, forget what the plot was, and the kids call me out on it. Jake told me that’s exactly why he built this—he has three boys, all with totally different interests, and after working all day and making dinner and helping with homework, he couldn’t keep up with their constant requests for “a story about me and my dinosaur.”
It doesn’t take any extra work, which is the best part. On nights when I’m already drained, I just ask the kids what they want their adventure to be that night, it takes me 30 seconds to type in the details, and that’s it. I still read the story out loud, we still cuddle up under the covers, we still turn the big light off and only have the lamp on like we always do. It’s not replacing the time we spend together, it’s just taking the work of making up the plot off my plate when I don’t have the energy.
I used to worry about screen time at bedtime, but this is no different than holding a paper book. The screen is just holding the words, same as a page. We still do our old favorite picture books two or three nights a week, I don’t use this every single night. But it’s my go-to on the nights when the kids are extra wound up, when they’ve had a big day and can’t settle down. Giving them a story where they’re the hero gives them a little sense of control right before they have to settle into being apart from us for the night, which cuts down on the endless requests for one more snack, one more drink, one more story before they actually go to sleep.
It’s not perfect. Last week I accidentally added too many details to a story, and it turned Lila’s pony into a fire-breathing dragon. But the kids thought that was even better, so I just rolled with it. Right now it’s still in free beta for two weeks, no strings attached, Jake just wants to get feedback from other parents to fix the kinks.
Tonight, Lila asked for a story where she’s a vet that takes care of baby elephants, and Jax wants to be a construction worker that builds them a big treehouse to live in. I’ve got the details typed in, waiting for after we brush teeth. I don’t know what’s going to happen with this project down the line, if Jake will keep it accessible or change it later. But right now, it’s turned our most chaotic part of the day into something calm, something that feels ours. The other night after we finished reading, Lila curled up into my side and whispered that it was her favorite story ever, because it was hers. That’s all any of us are trying to get out of bedtime, isn’t it?
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