Here’s how to do bedtime stories for your kids, according to two master storytellers
In my years as a journalist, I’ve had some challenging assignments: file a piece about an underground dinner for Michelin-starred chefs that ends at 3am in time for it to hit the morning pages, write an obit for an almost-dead person by calling up his nearest and dearest and asking for a few punchy quotes. But all pale in comparison with my new assignment which, like Sisyphus, I must complete nightly.
“Tell me a story about a book that is broken, and then the unicorn comes for a sleepover, but she’s really big,” my preschooler barks from her bed, her face awash in the neon pink emanating from her polar bear nightlight.
For years when I was a child, my father told me a serialized story featuring my stuffed animal, Bernie the Beaver, and his friend, Lou the pigeon. Brooklyn born and raised, Lou was often depicted swaggering down the middle of 59th Street squawking out, “I’m walkin’ here!” as cabs swerved to avoid him. Many of the events took place where I spent my time – Central Park, the American Museum of Natural History, the library – but Bernie and Lou’s park was full of magic places only they knew about, their museum’s dioramas came alive at night, and on and on. Dad had a real knack for storytelling, and knew just when and how to employ a cliffhanger, just how much narrative tension a young child could handle. I’d fall asleep with visions of the world outside my door coming alive, awaiting the following night’s chapter with all the anticipation of a Victorianera Pickwick Papersreader.
Why, a generation later, you might ask, am I taking narrative direction from someone who requests sprinkles on her eggs? Why not just recycle a beloved story I already know? Oh, I tried, at one point, but they all fell flat, so she smartly wrested control to ground the plot in her everyday life. I’ve made repeated attempts to focus them on a single hero – the prime candidate being her Cabbage Patch doll, so beloved that it has become her personal security detail, never leaving her side, and thus emanates an odor more appropriate to a medieval feast hall than a child’s bedroom. But no dice.
A second, perhaps more pressing question: Why bother? Why not just end our bedtime ritual with a book? Any form of storytelling – be that read or heard – has been shown to have myriad benefits for children: it increases verbal exposure, is beneficial for socio-emotional development, and enhances the ability to retain information. In hospital settings, it’s been shown to increase oxytocin and lower pain. And hearing stories about one’s own family, and knowing where you fit into that family narrative, has been linked to greater resilience and happiness. All good things, none of which require that I become Spalding Gray at the end of a long day. Plus, my preschooler might be too young to latch on to aural stories. They are, according to at least one study, too “cold” – she needs the pictures to make everything come into focus.
Still, I keep at it, not just because I have fond memories of my own father spinning me wonderful yarns, but also because my hunch is that once I nail the art form, something magical will happen.
“We’re the only creatures who tell stories, and it’s the job of adults to tell them to children,” Len Cabral told me over Zoom recently, “But there’s a lot of oh, I’m a little busy now, or I just can’t think of one.”
Cabral has been a professional storyteller since the 1970s, performing treasured folktales as well as original stories everywhere from schools to the Kennedy Center. In 2001, he received the National Storytelling Networks’ Circle of Excellence Oracle Award, and when not performing, he teaches work
shops on how to perfect the craft – when to pause, when to ask questions, voices to use, and the like. I came to him through a close friend, his niece through marriage, who sat her children in front of Zoom with Cabral throughout the pandemic. In videos of his work online, you can see him quiet a rowdy room with a look, morph into a snail riding on the back of a turtle (“Wheeeee!”), and bring auditoriums of children to a sort of rapture normally exhibited by Publishers Clearing House winners.
We spoke about how little movements can have huge impacts – he raised his arms, became a bear, then scrunched them in, and became a chipmunk – and the importance, and soothing nature, of repetition, both within a story and when telling it again and again. He told me how amazing it is to see the unique imagination of each of his listeners when they’re asked to draw the story after sessions with him, one reason he loves the oral tradition – your Anansi may look very different from mine. As for parents who don’t know where to begin?
“I’ll tell the kids, every scar is a story,” he said. “So check your parents out. Say, Dad,how’d that happen? Here comes a story. Your mom fell off a bike? Your grandparents worked on a farm? They’ve got stitches. They’ve got scars. They’ve got a story.”
There is, for writers like myself, one other reason we might want to capitalize on bedtime – at least according to George Saunders, one of the most beloved fiction writers of our time, who’s been a recipient of or finalist for almost every prestigious fiction award, including the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award. And because the world sometimes makes sense, he’s also a good person, at least if you judge character by how long it takes someone to respond to a cold request for thoughts on bedtime storytelling.
“I used to tell stories to our girls when they were little and what I loved about that was the way it forced me to take chances in front of them,” Saunders wrote to me, seven hours after I lobbed an email into the abyss and crossed my fingers. “Selfishly, I tend to be a very controlled and controlling writer – lots of revision and all of that – so the act of doing pure improv for these beloved little people, and the immediate and honest reaction I would get, was wonderful – actually gave me the courage to grow my ‘real’ work in the direction of spontaneity.”
Saunders said he and his children would collaborate on plot, and together invented a “mansplainer” named Eddie, a recurring character who allowed them to explore morality before shuteye. Saunders’ children’s book The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip came out of one of these nightly story times. But even for a professional writer, that endgame wasn’t the point – the impulse to create was much more fundamental.
“What a lovely thing it was, to huddle together and make something up at the end of the day,” he wrote. Indeed.
The other night, at the preschooler’s direction, I told a story about a book that breaks because it is so beloved, and read so much, that it finally falls apart. The savior: a unicorn. It was no Saunders, but at least it hung together.
After a beat, my daughter sat up in bed.
“Tell it again, Mama,” she said.
So I did.
Sophie Brickman is a contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Times and other publications, and the author of Baby, Unplugged: One Mother’s Search for Balance, Reason, and Sanity in the Digital Age