Stories From Your Childhood to Tell Your Kids at Bedtime

"Tell me about when YOU were little." If you've ever searched for stories from my childhood to tell my kids after hearing that for the third night in a row, you know the problem. You have about four stories, and your five-year-old has heard the bee-sting one so often she corrects you when you skip the part about the lemonade.

You actually have hundreds more. They're filed away under things you haven't thought about since you were nine. This post is about getting them back out, collecting the ones only your parents remember, and telling the hard ones in a way a small kid can handle.

Why kids want your stories so badly

Some of it is pure novelty. To a four-year-old, the idea that you were once small, got sent to your room, and were scared of the basement is wild news.

Some of it runs deeper. Psychologists at Emory built a 20-question "Do You Know" scale that asks kids things like how their parents met and where they grew up. Kids who knew more of those family facts tended to have higher self-esteem, lower anxiety, and a stronger sense of control over their lives. That's a correlation, and the kids studied were older than yours. Treat it as something these stories slowly build toward, one bedtime at a time. Researchers have also found the effects can look different from one family's cultural history to the next, so no single story is a fix for anything.

The small stuff counts too. One of those Emory researchers, Robyn Fivush, has said everyday stories matter as much as the dramatic ones, because they show kids that life is steady and that they come from people who got through things. So the time your mom's car died in the rain counts. So does the smell of Grandpa's garage.

Prompts to jog your memory

People and pets

• Your first pet, and what really happened to the goldfish
• The neighbor every kid on the street was a little afraid of
• Your best friend at age seven, and the game you two played over and over
• A teacher who was kind to you, or one who wasn't
• The babysitter with the strange rules

Places and smells

• What Grandpa's house smelled like (coffee, cigars, mothballs, bread)
• Your bedroom: the wallpaper, the nightlight, where you hid candy
• Your family's car, and who got the window seat
• The pool, the grocery store, the one restaurant you went to on birthdays

Disasters and firsts

• The worst haircut you ever had, and how did you react
• The time you got lost, or were sure you were
• Your first sleepover, and whether you made it to morning
• Something you broke and tried to hide
• Learning to ride a bike, including the crash

Being small

• What you were scared of at night
• A food you absolutely refused to eat
• What you wanted to be when you grew up
• The toy you begged for and never got

In our house, the disaster category wins every time. Anything where you got in trouble, got muddy, or cried over something ridiculous will get requested for months.

Turning a scrap into a five-minute story

A memory isn't a story until it has a shape. Think of these four bullets:

1. Where and when. "I was six, the same as you, and we lived in a yellow house with a crabapple tree out front."
2. What you wanted or what went wrong. "I really, really wanted to see if the cat could swim."
3. What happened next, with one or two details they can see or smell. The cold hose water. The cat's face.
4. How it ended, and how you felt. "I had to apologize to the cat. Grandma made me say it out loud."

Keep it short. HealthyChildren.org suggests keeping bedtime routines for school-age kids to 30 minutes or less, with limited choices like one story and one song. Your childhood story can be the one story. When they beg for more, "That's tomorrow's story" works as a cliffhanger.

Then hand the story over with a question. "What do you think I did with the broken lamp?" "How do you think Grandma felt when she saw the cat?" "Have you ever been that scared?" Let their guess be wrong and play along. In a study of parents talking about the past with their 4-year-olds, kids offered the most memories right after open-ended questions and warm responses from the parent. Our list of questions to ask your kids at bedtime has more openers that work well after a story ends.

Telling stories out loud also earns a real place next to the books. In a small randomized study of parents of 4-year-olds, kids whose parents were coached in this back-and-forth way of talking about the past told better stories themselves than kids whose parents were coached in a shared-reading method. Books are great. So is the story you can tell in the dark with the light already off.

Calling a grandparent to collect stories

Your parents, aunts, and uncles are holding stories you don't remember, including the ones about you. A phone call works better than a text, because one answer leads to the next question.

Here's a script you can use almost word for word:

"Hi Mom, quick favor. Maya keeps asking what I was like when I was little, and I'm running out of stories. Can I ask you a few questions? Is it okay if I record it so I don't forget?"

Pick three or four questions. Twenty will wear everyone out.

• "What was I like at Maya's age? What did I get in trouble for?"
• "What's a story from when you were little that I've never heard?"
• "What did your house smell like? What was for dinner most nights?"
• "How did you and Dad meet?"
• "What was the hardest thing that happened when you were a kid, and how did you get through it?"

A few things help:

• Use your phone's voice memo app. Hearing Grandma's actual voice tell it will matter to you later.
• Let the quiet sit. The good stuff often shows up after a long pause.
• Chase the throwaway lines. "Wait, you had a pet chicken?" is where the best stories hide.
• Stop before they're tired. Say you'll call next week with more questions. Now it's a standing date, and a lot of grandparents love having one.

You can also put a grandparent on speaker at bedtime and let them tell a story directly. Kids ask things you'd never think to ask, like whether the chicken had a bed.

I called my mom to go through this same exercise, and it completely changed our relationship. It reminded me that as life gets busy, it is important to take the time to reconnect.

Telling scary or sad family moments gently

Sooner or later the fun stories lead to hard ones: the house fire, the uncle who died young, the year Grandpa lost his job, the move from another country with one suitcase. Kids ask. It's okay to answer.

There's some research here, though with older kids. In a two-year Emory study that began just before 9/11, families who talked about hard family events clearly and openly with their 10- to 12-year-olds had kids who coped better over that time. Those families were all middle-class with two parents, and a preteen is a long way from a preschooler. But the plain-sense version works at any age:

• Lead with the ending. "Grandma's house burned down when she was little. Everyone got out safe, and they built a new one." Small kids need to know how it turns out before they hear the scary middle.
• Answer only what they ask. Then pause. A three-year-old may only want to know if the dog got out.
• Name feelings in plain words. "She was really scared, and she missed her stuffed bunny for a long time."
• Show who helped. The neighbors who brought casseroles, the aunt who took them in. That's the part kids hang on to.
• Move heavy ones out of bedtime. A daylight walk or a car ride leaves room for the follow-up questions that come later.
• Watch your kid. If they go quiet or start asking whether it could happen to your house, reassure them and stop there.

If a story touches something your child is going through right now, like a grandparent who's sick, it can help to talk it over with your pediatrician or your kid's teacher first. Our guide to helping kids through big changes has more on those moments.

Write it down before it's gone

Every story you collect is a piece of family history. Grandparents won't always be a phone call away, and you'll forget more of your own childhood than you expect.

Keep it low effort:

• One running note on your phone titled "Stories," one line per memory: "Dad's pet chicken, Henrietta, ate a whole birthday cake."
• A voice memo folder for each grandparent.
• A notebook by the bed where you jot down the story after you tell it, plus whatever your kid asked.
• Ask your kid to tell it back a week later. Their version will have new details, some of them made up.

That last one matters more as they get older. Research on teens retelling their parents' childhood stories found that the ones who connected those stories to their own lives, and understood how the parent felt back then, had higher well-being. The retelling you're starting at age five is early practice for that.

If one story becomes the family favorite, you can turn it into a printed picture book starring your family, and preview every page before anything prints. A spiral notebook does the job too. For more ways to keep this stuff without adding a project to your week, see memory keeping for busy parents.

Build your story tonight, and we love hearing from you on how this article helped you connect with your loved ones at hello@tadpoletales.com

Sources

• Print Close window February 23, 2010 “Do You Know…”
• How family stories help children weather hard times | Emory News
• Bedtime Routines for School-Aged Children - HealthyChildren.org
• A Micro-Analytic Approach to Parent-Child Reminiscing - ScienceDirect
• "Maternal elaborative reminiscing increases low-income children's narra" by Elaine Reese, Diana Leyva et al.
• Personal and intergenerational narratives in relation to adolescents' well-being - PubMed