Regular bedtime reading is a great way to help your child fall asleep and to strengthen your bond. Reading fairy tales or making up stories before bed has a proven positive effect on children’s mental well-being, builds language skills, and wonderfully nurtures imagination.
Why is it important to read to children before bedtime?
Reading stories to your child at bedtime is a special shared moment when you can enjoy closeness without distractions. It helps your child form a deeper connection with you, strengthens family bonds, and creates positive memories that last a lifetime.
By reading before bed, you expand your child’s vocabulary, help them grasp word meanings, and strengthen imagination and empathy by exploring how characters behave and feel. You’re also teaching them through different animals, characters, and stories. This gives your child a stronger foundation for future learning.
Bedtime routines, such as reading aloud repeatedly, help your child understand that it’s time to sleep.
How to choose books and stories by your child’s age
For the youngest children, choose books with simple pictures, high-contrast colors, and minimal text. Describe what’s in the pictures and talk about what they can see. Picture books, board books, and short, simple nursery rhymes and poems are great. Keep things brief, clear, and ideally rhythmic, because rhythm soothes and entertains even very small children.
For preschoolers (ages 3–6), choose short to medium-length fairy tales with easy-to-follow plots. Children need stories they can relate to, with the main characters’ emotions clearly named. Classics like Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella are suitable, as well as modern tales with child heroes.
For early grade-schoolers, you can pick stories that explore deeper themes such as friendship, courage, and moral choices. Chapter books and longer narratives work best, letting a child live with the story over several evenings and sink into it more deeply. Favorites include books by Astrid Lindgren (The Children of Noisy Village, Pippi Longstocking), Roald Dahl, and similar authors.
How to read aloud to children — tips and advice
Read clearly and slowly so children can follow the story and understand the meaning. Avoid reading too fast or skipping lines. Your pronunciation should be very clear, because your child improves their own speech by modeling yours.
Use expression and vary your voice — kids truly enjoy it. Changes in intonation and different voices for individual characters support your child’s imagination and keep their attention.
While reading, point to things in the pictures together and ask questions. For example: what do they think will happen next, how might a character be feeling, and what would they do in that situation? This kind of engagement makes the story much more vivid and naturally supports plot comprehension and a child’s emotional intelligence.
Recommended stories and books that are tried-and-true choices for children
- For the very youngest: The Little Mole and His Friends (Zdeněk Miler), Oball — My First Board Books, nursery rhymes by František Hrubín.
- Preschoolers: Grimm’s Fairy Tales, The Jungle Book — adaptations, Frog and Toad Are Friends (Arnold Lobel)
- Young schoolchildren: The Children of Noisy Village (Astrid Lindgren), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Roald Dahl)
Before bed, choose a book together, get set, and dive into a world of imagination and stories. You’ll see how much you’ll love a child who’s eager to read and look through the book with you — and who then falls asleep calm and content.