How to make bedtime easier: Free custom bedtime stories that star your kid
Last week, I was on bedtime duty alone. My husband took our 10-year-old to a delayed soccer practice, and my 4-year-old Jax was dragging his feet so bad he’d managed to dump his entire sock drawer on the bedroom floor instead of pulling on his dinosaur pajamas. He plopped down on the pile of socks and announced he wasn’t going to bed because “all the good stories have already been told.” I’d read our current favorite, the one about the space frog who finds a comet, three nights in a row. My mug of coffee had gone cold on the dresser an hour earlier, and I was this close to turning on a 20-minute cartoon and calling it a win.
I remembered a comment I’d seen that morning in my neighborhood parent group: a dad of three built a new tool that writes custom bedtime stories where your kid is the hero, and it’s free for a two-week beta right now. I saved the link while I was waiting for Jax’s goldfish crackers to finish cutting, pulled it up on my phone while he sorted socks into color piles. I asked him what he wanted his story to be about, and he said immediately: “I’m a pirate, treasure is blueberries, and Mr. Floof comes with me.” Mr. Floof is his lopsided stuffed rabbit that’s missing one eye. I plugged in his name, his age, the blueberry treasure, Mr. Floof, hit the button, and 30 seconds later we had a four-page story.
My 7-year-old Lila, who was already tucked in brushing her tangled hair, leaned over the bed and asked if she could do one too. She’s been obsessed with unicorns and vet stuff lately, so she made her story about a vet who takes care of hurt unicorns in the mountains behind our house, and she brought our golden retriever Max along to help. Before I even finished typing, both kids were under their covers, quiet, leaning in to listen.
I work three days a week as a preschool aide, so I know first-hand how much more kids pay attention when something is about them. But I’d never seen it work this fast. Jax usually fights bedtime for 45 minutes minimum, asking for one more drink, one more trip to the bathroom, one more hug. That night, he didn’t ask for anything after the story. He just rolled over and pulled Mr. Floof close. I started thinking about why that hits different than the regular store-bought story books we have on the shelf. All day, kids are told what to do: when to get up, what to eat, where to sit, how to line up. Bedtime is the last part of the day, and it’s the one spot they get to push back, because it’s the only control they have. When you give them a story that’s entirely theirs, where they’re the one calling the shots and saving the day, that control goes from being something they fight for to something you give them.
I tried it for something else a few days later. Jax was nervous about his first trip to the dentist. He’d heard a kid at playgroup say the dentist hurts your teeth, and he’d been talking about it nonstop for two days. That night, I helped him make a story: Jax is a brave knight who goes to check the dragon’s teeth in the castle. The dragon is scared too, so Jax holds his hand. The dentist gives Jax a blueberry lollipop when it’s over. He asked to read that story two nights in a row, and when we walked into the dentist’s office on Thursday, he told the hygienist “I already checked a dragon’s teeth. I can do this.”
The guy who built this is a software engineer with three kids, same as me, basically. He got tired of making up custom stories every night and running out of ideas, so he built this tool in his spare time. It’s in beta right now, so he’s just letting people try it for free for two weeks to get feedback. The stories aren’t perfect, by the way. Last week Lila’s unicorn story randomly added a stop at our local grocery store to buy chocolate milk, which we never mentioned, but she thought that was the best part of the whole thing. They’re a little messy sometimes, but that doesn’t matter to the kids. The point isn’t to get a polished bestseller. The point is that it’s theirs.
The thing I tell other parents I work with when they ask about it is, don’t skip the small details. Let your kid add every silly little thing they want: their stuffed animal, their pet, their favorite snack, the playground they go to on Saturdays. That’s the part that makes it feel real, not just a generic story with their name plugged in. You don’t have to overthink it. If they want a story about a kid who collects rocks and fights big slugs in the backyard, that’s fine. It doesn’t need a hidden lesson. It just needs to be theirs. I’ve even had a couple parents at my school say they use it for calm-down time after bad days, not just bedtime. If their kid came home upset because they lost a soccer game, they make a story where their kid scores the winning goal, and it helps them shake off the bad mood before dinner.
Last night, Sam, my 10-year-old, got home from soccer practice, leaned against the doorframe while we read Jax’s new story about a firefighter who rescues baby penguins. After we finished, he shoved his hands in his hoodie pockets and mumbled “can I do one too? It’s dumb, but whatever.” He made it about a space engineer who finds a whole new planet made of pepperoni pizza, and Max comes along to taste test it. After we read it, he rolled his eyes and said it was garbage, but I saw him save it to his camera roll.
I don’t know if this tool will stay free, or if it’ll change after the beta, or if my kids will get bored of it in a month. Right now, though, it cuts our bedtime battle almost in half, and it’s given me a little window into what’s bouncing around in their heads that they don’t always talk about. Some nights we still pull out the tattered space frog book and read it three times in a row. But on the nights when nothing else works, this is what we reach for.
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