Teach Your Child Family History with Bedtime Stories

People today often bemoan the lack of family contact and history. Relatives are sometimes dispersed to far corners of the country or the world and many children don't get a chance to know them well or to learn about their background. A way to help children appreciate their family history is to tell family stories as bedtime stories.

That's right. There's no need to read the latest children's book at bedtime (though there's nothing wrong with doing that, too). You can use simple family stories as a way to lull your young one to sleep and help them learn about who they are and where they come from.

As an adult, familiar with the stories, you may think there's not enough to them to hold your child's attention. But remember, your child loves to hear your voice and to the child, the story is new.

The simplest tale can make up a bedtime "story." For a while I was putting our son to bed with the story I called "Nan's House." That story basically amounted to going through the house describing each room in detail. It went something like this: "You walk in the front door and there's the couch where Uncle Fred always sat. His tobacco stand with the pipe rack were right there too. Over in the corner is the television which was in a big cabinet that sat on the floor and had a tiny little screen with a black and white picture. Pop-Pop's chair was in the other corner. That's where he sat and watched the Saturday Night Fights, only he never saw the whole fight because he always fell asleep before it was over." (and so on through all the rooms in the house)

Nan's House was my "growing up house" so I knew it and the neighborhood well. Another bedtime "story" was a trip through Nan's neighborhood. For that one, I'd take Jack on a walk down the dead-end street by her house and detail all the places where we used to play and the things we did, the trees we climbed, the places where we played dodge ball, the tree Johnny's sister fell out of and broke her arm.

Our stories went beyond describing places, I also told family stories with a little more action in them, like the time my parents drove cross-country in a snowstorm and had to put candles on the dashboard as a way to defrost the windshield in the days before powerful modern window defrosters.

So try using bedtime stories to give your child a taste of family history. Your child will enjoy it and feel more connected with her relatives, and you'll feel good knowing that you child knows a little more about the people and places that are meaningful for you.