It’s bedtime: your children gaze expectantly as you grapple for an idea. Do you want to tell a spontaneous story with no particular lesson, just a lot of entertainment? Or do you want to be more intentional and use storytelling to help your child to process an emotion, conflict, or event? Bedtime is a perfect time for either.
Even experienced storytellers feel stuck or empty sometimes. There is no magic formula for a great story, but there are elements that can help you find a path through the tangled underbrush of your subconscious and your child’s inner life.
To map out a story in your head, you’ll need:
- A Likeable or Relatable Hero (or Heroes): Parenting through stories is as much about listening as it is about telling, so ask your child who will star in his or her story. It can be an animal, a beloved superhero, a comfort object, a friend or family member, even the child himself. Keep in mind the characters we love are often as flawed as they are admirable.
- A Problem (An Internal or External Obstacle): You can use your story problem to address a challenge or issue that your child is dealing with. As such, your child’s experience of her day is the best source material for your story’s problem. Or you can just choose a good, old adventure problem, such as a dastardly villain or a collapsing bridge.
- An Action or Choice: Children identify with heroes and learn from them, so your protagonist should act and solve, rather than be rescued in the tradition of Sleeping Beauty. Choose an action that makes moral and social sense to you: if you don’t want your kids to resort to violence, have your hero outsmart the dragon instead of slay him.
- An Ending; happy ones work best for little kids. Resolution is key because it gives the listening child a sense of relief and satisfaction, and parents the chance to summarize the lesson. The resolution should speak to a change in the character, his perspective, his friends, or his world. The ending should be a space of comfort and pleasure: you might end with a party, an embrace, a warm meal, or cozy bed.
Relax and enjoy, because bedtime stories don’t have to be masterpieces, just the right tale for your kid on a given day.
