Family stories

Family stories are easier to choose when you look past the word family and ask who is in the room.

Grandparents

The Old Man and His Grandson is eight gentle minutes and, quietly, about how we treat people when they are old. Grandmother, six minutes, is about the stories a grandmother carries and what happens to them. Both pair well with the grandparents collection.

Brothers and sisters

The Six Swans, five minutes, and The Wild Swans, nine, are both about a sister saving her brothers, and are worth reading a week apart so a child can spot that they are the same shape. The Bundle of Sticks is six minutes and the shortest argument against squabbling ever written. More of them sit in sibling stories.

Old tales are full of stepmothers, absent parents and children sent out to make their own way, and that can catch you off guard halfway down a page.

It is worth knowing in advance rather than discovering it at bedtime. Hansel and Gretel begins with parents who cannot feed their children. The Daughter of the Mother in the Corner, nine minutes, is about keeping a family tradition alive after someone has gone.

Children from every kind of household read these without difficulty, and often with relief: a story where the family is complicated is a story that has room for theirs. If you would rather adjust a tale as you read it, adapting a fairy tale for your child explains how to do it without breaking the story.

The commonest family problem is not in the stories at all. It is a four-year-old and an eight-year-old sharing one bedtime.

Two things work. Pick a story whose age range is wide, such as Rapunzel, written here for five to twelve, so neither child is being talked down to. Or pick a short one for the younger child and let the older one stay for a second, longer story once the little one has gone: The Magic Fishbone at six minutes and The Picky Prince, the Princess and the Peanut at five are both good first halves of that arrangement.

Our guide to bedtime stories for two children has the rest, including what to do when they want different stories on the same night.

Three narrower themes sit underneath this one, and each has a different centre of gravity.

Mothers is the smallest at ten stories and the most tender. Fathers holds 32, and is more often about work, protection and getting things wrong. Identity, 41 stories, is the one to choose when a child is asking who they are rather than who they belong to.

A surprising number of family tales begin with the adults leaving. That is not neglect; it is the door the story needs, and children read it as permission rather than as danger.

Left in charge

The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids, eight minutes for ages five to eight, is the clearest case: a mother goes out, the instructions are ignored, and the children have to sort it out. The Seven Foals, six minutes, and The Master Maid, nine and retold from Norwegian folklore, both hand the whole problem to somebody young.

The True History of Little Golden Hood, five minutes, is worth adding to the pile: it is Little Red Riding Hood with the child considerably more capable, and it makes a good answer if your family has decided the usual version is unfair.

These are also the right pick for a child who has just been told they are too small to do something. The story does not argue with the grown-up who said it. It simply shows somebody young being equal to a large problem, and lets your child draw the obvious conclusion in their own time.