Hey parents, how many of you read vs. tell stories before bedtime for your kids?
My son loves reading time before bed, but he’s only 3.5 so the books have mostly been picture books until now. Lately though he’s been getting more into stories with plots and an extended narrative, but entirely in the form of movies. There aren’t a lot of kid’s books to go around with the sorts of dramatic stories he likes, they’re more like “caterpillar eats food” and “train engine climbs a hill with grit and determination” type stuff. And whenever I’ve tried to have him just lay down and listen to me read a story without any pictures to stare at he has absolutely no interest. He really likes having pretty visuals to look at.
I know when I was a small child these sorts of board/picture books weren’t really a thing in India. The pre-sleep ritual was usually “storytime” instead, where my parents would tell us stories. I’m a little bit concerned that my kid has been so accustomed to always having visual cues presented to him that it’s stunting his imagination a bit, like failing to exercise his capacity to visualize ideas and concepts for himself without being anchored by some artist’s depiction.
So I’m curious to hear from other parents or caregivers/educators (@kfwyre?). Did you find there was a natural transition point between going from picture books to telling/reading stories? Was there any sort of work you had to do to enable it? Are there “exercises” I can work on to help my son exercise his imagination? I have been working with him to have him tell me stories about his day, which he does pretty well. But his stories are always quite grounded and he’s usually telling me what he’s actually done and seen. When my nephews and nieces were his age they tended to spin out a lot of random stories that pretty obviously did not happen, and I assume this is because they had more experience being told stories themselves rather than just factual reporting about the happenings around them.
I don't think your 3.5 year old is stunted because they can't yet visualize stories. There are many many many excellent children books at different points on the spectrum.
Does he have an interest in Dr. Seuss? Another favorite of mine at a young age was The Monster at the End of this Book by Jon Stone. You could also look at Richard Scarry or Berenstain Bears all have great visuals and some sense of story.
Edit: some people also just struggle with mental visualization (aphantasia), my partner is one. But she is also a voracious reader.
My wife is a Professor in Rehabilitation Science, specifically Speech Language Pathology, and studied early childhood development for her Bachelors degree. She also worked clinically as an SLP for a bunch of years. This is mostly things I've learned from her. We have 3 kids, 19f, 14f, 10m.
One of the best things you can do with your kids to set them up for success with language and imagination is to read to them. Picture books are a way to engage children's attention and stimulated imagination. It helps to related words with images. Books of all types can help foster imagination:
Each of them incorporate imagination, and each in different ways. It can be beneficial to think of them as different muscles of imagination. At 3.5 years old, it is not an expectation to be beyond the first two types I've listed here. The important thing is to switch things up and keep pushing language boundaries. If you find that you have a kid that really doesn't like books without pictures, then there's a great book by BJ Novak (Ryan from the Office) called "The Book With NO Pictures" which is a book that is wildly enjoyable for everyone.
My big recommendation would be to continue to read at whatever level makes your kid love being read to. Whatever level of reading builds imagination and language.
The other thing to consider regarding imagination is play time. One of the things that parents tend to do these days is to schedule structured play. Structured play is things like sports or games with rules (whether it's hide and go seek or soccer), or overly scheduled games (think: "I got out the blocks for him to build a castle with" or "they are going to build this lego set" or "it's time for colouring"). Unstructured play is time where you let your child self direct and figure things out; "here's a bunch of stuff, have fun". You can do unstructured play with your kid, but it's important to let them drive the activity sometimes. I've heard people call this sort of thing "intentional neglect" but I think that's a pretty terrible way to look at it. Unstructured play lets your child exercise their imagination muscles to keep themselves entertained. It is super important!
Last point I have is just not to measure your son by other kids. Each kid is different, and you might have a kid that loves spinning stories, and you might have a kid who just doesn't. My son doesn't spin stories; if you ask him about something, he'll give you a factual rundown on it. Even when he is writing something, he is not the first to come up with a creative idea; that's just not his forte. But if you give him a scenario or framework in which to write a story - if you give him the setup - then he can unfold a great, albeit not particularly flowery or literary, way to "solve" a story. For example, he would never think to write a heist story, but if you gave him the setup of "I want you to write a story where someone does something to rob an art gallery to save the world" he will give you a pretty good rundown on what they're stealing, how they stole it, and why it saves the world. Kids are all different, and that's ok.
Really last point: if you feel like your kid is behind, though, then it's always a good idea to try to get an assessment with a Speech Language Pathologist. Edit: I promise I will at least try to stop editing after this! I think that an SLP would be the right person to talk to in a case like this because you're worried about expressive language; our son saw a (different, not his mother) SLP when he was a bit older than yours, and they basically told us approximately what I said in the last paragraph, but also gave him some tools to help be more expressive in the things that he's saying. Sometimes it's not about imagination, but showing and sharing what they are thinking.
This is basically my approach to let him explore and do what he wants. I intervene to stop messes or safety hazards and I offer help if he seems to be getting frustrated. Sometimes I’ll chime in and help him make a mental connection if he seems in the neighborhood (e.g. “Hey if stacking the red and blue tiles together make it look purple I wonder what happens if you stack other colors?”). Otherwise he’s largely puttering around on his own.
I’m not actually concerned about this from a cognitive development perspective. It’s more of a vague spiritual sense that I want him to have his own imagination and ideas about how things look rather than being too heavily influenced by commercial art. Kind of like how I have a mental image of Aragorn when I read the Lord of the Rings and he doesn’t look at all like Viggo Mortenson, but basically everyone born after me reads those books and sees Viggo in their mind’s eye. (Gandalf does look like Ian McKellen but, strangely, he always did!) He’s too young to be worried about that I know, but I think that sort of ability to “conjure an image” is a muscle that needs training but I’m not really sure when it gets trained. I also encounter a lot of people who are simply not that good at it as adults. I don’t know to what extent it’s a nature vs. nurture thing, but I feel like my own skills have atrophied over time (basically as I’ve come to spend more time consuming visual media rather than reading) so I know there is some element of conditioning. So I am concerned it might be wiring my kid in a certain way too.
I think it's great to try to exercise your kid's brain muscles, but this is also something that is easy for some people, hard for some people, and impossible for some people. Some people simply aren't able to conjure up images of things in their mind. And also, it's totally okay if that's just not how someone's brain works. Reading of all types will help develop the muscles that exist, and won't (shouldn't? maybe I should hedge) prevent other muscles from developing.
Something that does (may? maybe I should hedge again) impede other muscles from developing properly is screens vs. books. In general, books help develop strong cognitive and language skills, and screens do something different. This is especially true when the screens have moving images (ie. videos) or changing text. I'm not saying that some screen time is necessarily bad - kids basically have to be able to use tech - but that screens aren't good for things like attention span or fostering imagination.
To continue with the exercise analogy, books with pictures are more like having a good spotter when weight lifting, but a screen is more like having someone help you lift the weights, so your muscles don't develop in the same way.
With our kids, we limited screen time to none until they were 3, then slowly increased limits as they aged. Our son now gets 1hr of screen time to use during a day, or 2 hours on weekends. In my experience, this is wildly different from some of the other kids he knows; one of them is on Roblox from the time he gets home at 3pm until he goes to bed at midnight.
From someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about these sorts of things over the past 20 years (and is married to someone who does research on it for a living), to me it sounds like you're already doing good, important things, and you are setting your little guy up for success.
Different minds of course work differently too. I have basically no mental imagery and never have. I still love reading - it just doesn’t involve any visual element whatsoever. So it’s always possible your kid might not have quite the same experience which could affect the kinds of books or activities he’s ultimately interested in.
I think you might be guilty of something that everyone is in some sense, in thinking you fully understand your life experience and what has come from what. Now I'm not trying to discourage you because a verbal bed time story sounds awesome if you can get your kid into it but as someone who was very much raised on picture books and is now reading the same books to my kids I don't think you have anything to worry about. There are picture books my parents read to me that I still remember as an adult that evoked a strong sense of wonder -- I couldn't tell you much about the plot of the book but I do remember the art. Picture books can also inspire a ton of imagination beyond just a static visual image -- as anyone who used to sit and stare at Magic: The Gathering cards for hours as a child can tell you.
I've got a 5 year old, and reading has always been a part of both their bedtime routine.
Casting my mind back a bit, at 3.5 years we were reading 3 or 4 short books every night in their room before bed. The books tended to be ones for slightly older kids but which had fun rhymes or nice pictures (though we never read picture books at bedtime, or at least bedtime stories had a decent bit of reading in them - my assumption being that hearing our voice was important). They would often interrupt and ask questions about a picture ("what's that?" "where is (character x)?") and we were always happy for it to go off track.
Now that they are a bit older, we start with reading a few books and then we have "made-up stories" after lights out. This is me making up a story that is sometimes by request (I want a story about a giraffe) or something I come up with. Usually some variation of an animal or kid up to mischief, often nonsense but always happy/funny endings (mouse getting into a bakery and eating all the food, boy floating to space on a lawn chair with balloons tied to it, baby with metal teeth that kept chewing it's way out of its crib and waking up it's parents).
Beyond the prompts for stories they don't tell a whole lot of stories themselves.
One thing we are doing recently is jokes - there was a story which ended with a prompt to consider the punchline for a joke "what do crocodiles eat for breakfast" and this has kicked off me sharing some simple jokes (how do you catch a rabbit? Hide behind a bush and make a sound like lettuce) and them coming up with their own bizarre anti jokes which are hilarious (why was the boy inside the raisin? Because the raisin ate him). These often feel like the kernels of stories.
Caveats: I’m not a parent and not experienced with working with kids at that age level, so take everything I say with a big grain of salt. Also I’m typing this up at work so apologies if it comes across as hasty or scattered!
From what I do know, I don’t think you need to be worried. Books with pictures are still common in early elementary school, and students don’t transfer to fully text-based books until mid-elementary. This window for those has also gotten bigger recently, as graphic novels and comics have flourished for all ages, so students can continue to read books with visuals well into the middle grades, high school, and even adulthood.
If I were in your situation, I’d try to engage my kid in the storytelling act themselves as a way of sparking their imagination, making the story interactive with them. You could start to tell a story and then, oh no, there’s a snake! What does the snake look like? Ask your child to make up details, then work those into the story, before pausing at another point to ask them about what the snake does next, or how a character responds, etc. It’s not that you’re telling a pre-written story but effectively creating a collaborative imaginary story with your child’s input.
One of the early reading teachers I know really loves the Verbalizing and Visualizing curriculum (commonly called “V&V” in schools). I haven’t used it myself, but I trust her judgment a lot. It might be worth looking into if, as your child gets older, you’re noticing that visualization remains difficult. Some prepackaged curricula like that would require a specialist, but a lot of those could buy as a parent and implement yourself. Just know that they tend to be very pricey.
You could also search up Teachers Pay Teachers for visualization activities and resources. This used to be an Etsy style shop for bespoke activities made by real teachers, and, just like Etsy, has unfortunately become overrun with mass-produced stuff and slop. There’s still a lot of good stuff there if you dig for it though.
It’s worth noting that some people simply don’t visualize much. I myself am pretty strongly aphantasic. This could be the case for your son, but I think it’s probably way too early to tell for sure. All this means is that, as a reader, he’ll have to use a different set of strategies to make sense of things, and he might have different preferences for the types of text he reads.
For example, I personally love idea-based fiction because I can hang my hat on that (I read a lot of sci-fi). Anything that’s more imagery-based or character-driven can be a challenge, because visual information slides right off my brain, and characters can often be hard for me to tell apart unless they have very distinct personality differences or roles. Fantasy is rough for me though, because a lot of its richness comes from your imagination creating the world described in the book, but mine pretty much stays blank.
I say all of this to point towards the broader idea that your son is his own unique individual, and every single one of us develops in different ways and rates. I know early parenting strongly focuses on different developmental milestones, and those can create pressures and anxieties if your child is hitting them at an irregular rate or is distinctly different from his peers. Bring up your concerns with his pediatrician and trust their judgment on things, but otherwise, let your child grow and develop and continue to support him the best way you can.
Once he starts school, he’ll be in a pipeline full of professionals who know not only how to work with kids his age but who have seen enough to know the spread of behaviors and skills that are typical of kids his age. They’ll be able to identify which skill gaps are simply part of the general diversity of any population of kids, versus the ones that are genuinely concerning and might need to be addressed.
Also, I want to give you some reassurance as a parent: your involvement with your child matters far more than it being the exact “correct” type of involvement. At your son’s age, being involved counts for like, 95%, whereas doing the “exact right thing” (if there even is one) is like, 5%. The fact that you even engage in nightly storytime with your son means you’re doing, by and large, the right thing, even if that storytime isn’t “perfectly” suited to your kid’s visualization needs. You are still meeting SO many other needs by doing that. The “wrong” option here isn’t suboptimal storytime — it’s no storytime at all.
I'm not creative enough to make up stories on the spot, so reading has always been the majority of bedtime. Failing that, regurgitating a plot of a movie they haven't seen.
What I've noticed is that developing a love of stories, regardless of medium, pays dividends (small sample size). My elder child just voraciously devours almost any story they can remotely relate to now that they can read. And while it does kind of reign in the nature of their stories in that transition period between say 2 and 5, as interests and exposure to the rest of the world expands, so will their expectations and imaginations. Honestly, just engaging in any reading, regardless of quantity of pictures, is far more important until like age 8 or 9 when habits and reading levels are more established.
Cutting screen time is far more impactful than worrying about picture books IMO.
My 3.5 also prefers stories with pictures over stories just told to them, but that all falls apart when I ask for input.
I have gotten to the point where I will take some random piece of media that I know well (generally a Tolkien subplot or something, like last night was the party meeting Beorn and him disappearing and seeing bear tracks) and asking them what they think should happen. The plot derails from there but I can generally keep it going for long enough to count as a story.
"After dinner, all of the dwarves noticed that their host had not come back for a while. One of them looked outside and saw...."
"What did they see?!"
"BEAR TRACKS! Giant bear tracks! Leading away from the house!"
"Oh no! I hope he is okay! Do they go looking after him??"
"What do you think they should do? Remember that Gandalf said that he was a strange man."
"I think we should go make sure he is okay."
"The rest of the party agrees, and they load up their bags with some extra bread and honey just in case this hunt takes a while..."
I remember when I was quite little, my dad would tell me a repetitive story about a car that fell apart as it was driving down the road. I learned the names of many auto parts.
On the other hand, my mom read very sophisticated books with me before I started reading long books on my own.
There isn't one good way.
My daughter just turned 4 - for Christmas her aunt and uncle gave her The Princess in Black and we’ve been reading them regularly ever since. I actually really enjoy them too. They’re real books with chapters, character development, POVs, and multiple plots, but there are beautiful pictures on each page too. We read 1-2 per night depending on how much time we have. It’s about 20 minutes or so per book.
We have a couple other series that are similar (Angelina Ballerina, Mercy Watson) but the Princess in Black is the best.
We tried and failed at books without pictures too.
Maybe 3.5 is a little young to start completely understanding books with no visuals, but isn’t bed time a good time to be “less stimulated” anyways. Maybe you can try reading a book targeted towards 8-10 year olds right before they’re going to sleep. Those books often have a map of the world in the back of the book to give context, but the chapters have no visuals. It can ease them into the idea of not having visual stimulation to go along with a book and if it gets too boring for them, they can just fall asleep.
I noticed with my girlfriend’s little sister, that there was a huge change in maturity and development from 3.5 to 4, so it may just be that you are a few weeks too early.
My kid is 6.5 and still loves picture books. Heck, my wife is mumble mumble an age and she still buys picture books for her own collection. There's no age limit on picture books! (check out Shaun Tan's amazing work for example). We read chapter books too now with the kid, but that's only really been a thing for maybe the last year. Format is usually a chapter or so of whatever 'grown up' book we're reading - currently Harry Potter - then a picture book or two for sleep wind-down. Kid will force themselves to stay awake if we're reading something new so we have to fall back on something already known if we want them to actually sleep! Occasionally we'll do audio books too, which is costing me a fortune in Paddington...
But really, the only thing that matters is books. Doesn't matter what sort. Picture, audio, chapter, board, whatever. Books books books. At that age kids are learning how stories work so just expose them to loads of stories. You say they are forming their own narratives from reality right now and that's great - they are figuring out the structure of telling stories, the imaginative details will come later. I always feel like my job is to guide the kid into loving books because books now means reading of all sorts later, and reading is one of the most important habits there is. Maybe they'll never get into the imaginative stuff, maybe they'll just read non fiction for pleasure and that's perfectly cool too. What's not cool is no books :(
Perhaps outside of bedtime, when things can be a bit more interactive/involved, you might try some wordless books. My kid loved Journey at that age, you can tell the story together, ask questions about how some characters might be thinking or feeling, make up voices and dialogue and so on and it can be a bit different every time. Pippa Goodheart's You Choose books are still a favourite today for imaginative play.
Someone mentioned illustrated chapter books like Dahl or Walliams, Dahl is OK but pretty dated in his attitude but David Walliams is just bad. If he wasn't already famous there's no way he'd be published. Try Chris Riddell (esp Ottoline) or Andy Griffith's Treehouse books, and my kid loved the Billy and the Mini Monsters books too, but there's loads out there these days.
Finally I will never not recommend Idan Benbarak's The Very Hard Book for imaginative reading fun. It's not a story book but it will absolutely engage your kid's imagination! (and at age 3.5 they will beat you at the Stroop test every single time)
There are, I promise. Go to the library. Go to a bookshop. Take the kid, ask the staff, read some books while you're there. You'll find things. Kids books these days are so, so good and cover a huge spectrum of styles and genres. I love kids books.
My son is soon seven. We read to him every night before he is going to sleep and he loves it. Part of the reason for that is him having a large impact on what we're reading. At 3.5 it was definitely only picture books. It's still a mix of what we read, but pictures are getting less and less important. One difference from when I was a kid is that pictures are prevalent in books for much older kids now. It's not uncommon for books aimed at 10 year olds to have a lot of pictures as well. I can't really recommend anything specific as we're only reading in Swedish, but I imagine the general trends being pretty similar. I hope that addressed your worries :)
Ok, one tip, "Where is my cow?" by Terry Pratchett
I have read to both of my kids up until my oldest was around 10. My youngest kid would mostly just bop along and casually listen, but after the big one grew out of reading time (he reads by himself now) my youngest announced that he wouldn't tolerate chapter books anymore. It turns out that graphic novels can be a great way over that hump. We started with the Dog Man series, and moved on to others from there. Last year we were able to introduce The Wild Robot with little complaints.
My 3 year old daughter likes 1-2 of her simpler books and then afterwards we tell her the "story of her day" where I narrate all the parts of the day I had with her.
For books with narrative, she loves a picture book called "Nobody Likes a Goblin". I take her to the library and get books often, the children's best sellers section tend to have nice condensed plots.
I have a soon to be 4yo (mid April). We’ve been reading every night before bed since they were about 1. And starting about four months ago they asked about a big box we have labeled “older books”. It has the “Little House on the prairie” series. I cannot suggest this enough!
Each book has a few pictures every couple pages to keep them engaged, it’s got kids their age, it’s simple. My 4yo is absolutely enthralled! We’ve read 4 of the books so far. Just a few pages to a chapter along with our regular books like the construction site series by Sheri dusky rinker or something else with pictures. But we end off with the little house series to wind down for lights out and it’s been a huge success.
Ah my kid loves those Construction Site books though I kind of hate them ha.
The rhyme scheme is nice to read and the art is good, but something about the total erasure of the fact that people are doing all that work, not machines bugs the hell out of me. Doesn’t matter to the boy though. Haha
I’ll have to give the prairie books a try. I grew up in India so we just had different references. It was mostly imported Archie comics and traditional folk tales for us.
At around that age I read perhaps a hundred hours of "Pikachu uses Thunderbolt. It's super effective!" with kiddo on my lap. It's got music, it's got visuals, it has a simple but compelling narrative of "gotta catch em all" and "I want to be the very best, like no one ever was".
As for bed time at that age, we super avoided stirring the imagination or heaven forbid, starting entire new trains of thought and conversation. It's bed time we're old and tired good night here's the same song you've heard thousands of times bye.
Not a professional educator, but training for imagination and reading skills came during the day time for us. The written word and the spoken story are brand new and exciting technologies that we invite exploration during activity time, not scheduled eat poop sleep time. Just my two cents for what worked for us.
Edit: nowadays, bed time reading is for us old people to catch up on one book among literally hundreds kiddo already read on their own. Kiddo is doing a great job encouraging literacy at home, so important at our advanced age.
My daughter is 3 and her book choices are all over the place. She sometimes gets really into books where I'm not sure how much she even understands what is happening.
This one was her favorite for a while:
https://imgur.com/a/kHDStrO
Caught me by surprise the first time I read it, but she really likes Spiderman. So at her request, I just keep reading the whole thing, Uncle Ben and all.
My 11yo reads for himself or listen to audiobooks. I'm been getting into comic books again for the last couple of years and that seems to have a small impact on his interest in reading. Mine too! I read every night for my 4yo girl and did the same for the older brother when he was younger. To me reading for/with your kids at bedtime is just how it is and I can't imagine not doing it. I take my youngest to the library every other week to get a fresh batch of books and she sometimes pick one or two books herself but mostly I choose (so we don't end up solely with those horrible Paw Patrol/Frozen "marketing" books). Also never underestimate just how many times kids want to hear the same story and that's a good thing although it can be tiring for the parent. When they feel comfort in how the story unfolds and know what's going to happen it opens up to different conversations and imagination in my experience. It's the same with TV shows. The other day I was actually quite surprised that she could almost recite a book verbatim just from memory with me which at the same time is also comforting because sometimes I wonder if she's even listening.
In relation to language one thing I haven't seen mentioned here yet is singing. I like to sing and do it quite often and I love making silly songs out of things we're doing right now. My son especially likes it when I use football chants in regular settings and it's just fun and so easy to do! One choice of yogurt! There's only one choice of yogurt...One choice of yooooooooougurt... You get my point.
At bedtime we've always had a songbook in the bookcase just in case and we use it now and then. If you'd like to sing more during bedtime I'll recommend a songbook with build in melodies. It surprised me just how well it worked and it has taught me countless children songs I didn't now beforehand.
I did both with my daughter at that age (she's 10 now). Story time was always "little frog stories" ( more on that below) and books were whatever. Couple of recommendations:
. All of her writing is very lyrical.
Little frog story details
Little frog stories always begin the same way:
From there, I would just make something up about where they went. It's usually just a narrative of a short journey. I always try to vividly describe the setting with lots of colors, like "the meadow was full of flowers in every color you could imagine. Pink and blue and green and white and yellow and purple."
Whenever they eat something, it is always "delicious flies".
All the stories end the same way:
They came back over the hill to their pond just as the sun was going down. They snuggled into their little frog beds in their little frog houses. The first frog said, "Wasn't it great that (brief recap the story). And the other two frogs allowed that it was great, but they were very glad to be back in their little frog houses and their little frog beds. And the first frog said as he drifted off to sleep, he said, "But tomorrow, let's see what's up over the hill."
Starting and ending the same gives the story framework - you know the first part, and you know where you're going to end up. While you are telling the first part, it gives you time to think of the middle.
There are lessons about the values of exploring, of supporting and listening to your friends, and of exploring the beauty of nature.
cc: @kfwyre (since mentions/pings still don't work in topic text, AFAIK)
/offtopic
I didn’t get pinged for the topic text, but I did get this one, so you’re right on them not working. Thanks for the notification!