In the age of AI, it’s easier than ever to outsource the mental tasks you’re just too busy to do. Make me a grocery list and organize it by aisle so I don’t miss anything. Plan me a week of meals that are high in protein. Write this insurance appeal letter for me. Some parents are even using AI to write their children bedtime stories, and tech giants are rolling out AI-powered apps that promise to create what basically sounds like a short film in seconds.
Bedtime can feel like running a gauntlet. It’s 8 p.m. You’ve been working and parenting all.day.long. You’ve brushed teeth and wiggled a lotion-y kid into pajamas and read two books and performed the song you sang them once three years ago that is now cemented into the bedtime routine. The idea of creating an original bedtime story from your beleaguered brain, at this point, feels nearly impossible.
So, it’s understandable why some parents have turned to AI to write the bedtime stories for them. According to TechCrunch, Meta is beta testing a new AI-based app called StoryKit that can create stories in text, picture book, or audiobook form with a few bits of input from you about the character and setting.
But what if you don’t want a superintelligent robot involved in your kid’s bedtime routine? Isn’t there a way to tell bedtime stories yourself without it feeling like you’re trying to wring the creative juices out of your brain? Scary Mommy got a lesson in doing just that from Corey Rosen, a writer, actor, and storytelling coach who has hosted The Moth, taught story structure to teams at Pixar and Lucasfilm, and authored two books.
“Bedtime can be the best and the worst. As a dad, I cherish that time. That's precious time to spend together with my kids in the closest proximity you can be. You're snuggling in bed, and you're at the sort of ritualistic end of the day. That is bonding time. It's also exhausting. You're done with your day and you'd like them to be done with their day. And the process can be, let's just say, drawn out some nights,” Rosen shared.
If you’re absolutely spent and your kid asks for a bedtime story, don’t panic. Rosen’s first tip is that it’s OK — ideal, even — to tell a boring story. It’s natural to feel like you’re supposed to tell an exciting, engaging story, but isn’t the point to get them off the edge of their seat and lull them to sleep?
Once, when his brother visited and offered to put Rosen’s children to bed with a bedtime story, he emerged an hour later asking how on earth they ever got the kids to go to sleep. That’s when this lesson clicked for him.
“I realized… you're way too interesting. He started changing his stories and adding all kinds of details. He was talking about the fact that one of the characters, I think it was a frog, was an accountant and, well, it was tax season and the accountant had to file a lot of different forms. He started talking about the different documents. Within six minutes, the kids were fast asleep. He figured out the art of children's storytelling: be less interesting.”
Second, you can always recycle your bedtime story from the night before. Take those same characters on a new adventure. Recite the same plot but with astronauts instead of pirates. Honestly, your kids might want to hear exactly the same story again, and that’s perfectly fine.
“If you've done a good job, then the next night the kids will say, ‘Tell that story again.’ And you say, ‘Well, what's the next part of the story?’ And then you're creating a universe, or you're helping your kid create that.”
Tip No. 3: Don’t work so hard. Let your kids do some of the imagining with you and co-create a bedtime story. When his kids were younger and he needed to put together a bedtime story in a pinch, Rosen relied on a structure known as the Ken Adams story spine. It’s a series of eight sentence starters that go like this:
- Once upon a time…
- Every day…
- But one day…
- Because of that…
- Because of that…
- Because of that…
- Until finally…
- Ever since then…
“I’ll say, ‘Once upon a time there was…’ And they'll say, ‘There was a dragon.’ And then maybe I'll add some color and describe the dragon. And then I'll say, "And every day..." And then the kids will write the story for you. I look at my job as I'm sort of the narrator packaging that story they really create.”
Co-authoring a story this way also teaches your child about cause and effect. It’s “teaching them a little narrative lesson along the way that things have consequences and one thing leads to another until it creates a final climactic moment that pulls together all the things they've created.”
We all know that reading and writing teach these kinds of important lessons, but the process of hearing you think up a bedtime story (and participating in creating it with you) imparts so many lessons to our kids that we don’t even realize.
Bedtime is also an opportunity to hear more about our kids’ days and tell bedtime stories tailored to what they’re experiencing in real life. Right before bed is often when kids really spill their guts and want to talk things out. Rosen chalks this up to “diffuse thinking,” a term coined by Barbara Oakley in her neuroscience book The Mind for Numbers.
“It’s this idea that sometimes our best ideas come when we're really relaxed, when we're taking a walk or something, and your brain is just free to think. Maybe a problem that we've been focusing on that we haven't solved, when we're relaxed, we're able to think about that. I think that's what happens with kids [at bedtime],” Rosen says. “You might be having flat, empty dinner table conversations when you ask direct questions like ‘What'd you do today?’ ‘Nothing.’ But through their creative mind, through making up a story, we might actually learn some insightful things about something that's going on, things that they're scared of or worried about or looking forward to.”
source https://www.scarymommy.com/parenting/how-to-tell-bedtime-story-when-youre-exhausted
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