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The Secret to a Great Bedtime Story? Make It Boring.
There's something wonderful about bedtime. You're snuggled up with your kids, the day is winding down, and you have this little pocket of time together.
There's also something exhausting about bedtime.
You've already done everything. You're ready to sleep. And then comes the request: "Tell me a story."
As a dad, I've been there. And I've learned that bedtime storytelling doesn't have to require much energy or creativity.
In fact, sometimes the secret to a great bedtime story is to make it incredibly boring.
I learned this from my brother.
He once offered to put my kids to bed and emerged an hour later, completely exhausted, wondering how we ever managed to get them to sleep.
His problem? He'd been telling stories that were way too interesting.
Eventually, he changed tactics and started telling an incredibly boring story about a frog who was an accountant dealing with tax season.
Six minutes later, everyone was asleep.
Sometimes, the best bedtime story is the boring one.
Another trick? Recycle.
You don't need to invent an entirely new story every night. Reuse one you've already told. Change the characters. Send them on a different adventure. Or simply pick up where you left off.
If your kids ask to hear the same story again, that's not a failure of imagination. You may have just started building a little story universe together.
And when you really don't have anything left in the tank, let your kids do some of the work.
When my kids were younger, I used a simple storytelling structure called the Kenn Adams’ Story Spine to build stories together. It's a framework I teach in my workshops and share in my latest book, A Story for Everything.
It goes 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 might start with, "Once upon a time there was…" and let my kids decide what comes next.
"A dragon!"
Great. Now we have a dragon.
Then we keep going.
My job becomes less about inventing an entire story and more about narrating and connecting the ideas my kids create.
And that's one of the things I love about storytelling.
You don't always have to perform a story for your kids. You can make one with them.
And sometimes, those made-up stories lead to the real conversations you weren't able to have earlier in the day.
I recently had the pleasure of talking with Scary Mommy about these techniques and a few other tricks for telling bedtime stories when you're running on empty.
We talked about why boring stories can be surprisingly effective, how to keep a story going without constantly inventing something new, and how storytelling can help you learn what's really going on in your child's world.
Read the full article on Scary Mommy:
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