Fathers stories

The theme divides by movement. In one half, a father goes looking; in the other, the children go and he waits.

Hansel and Gretel is the famous example of the second kind: nine-year-olds recognise very quickly that the woodcutter lets it happen. The Seven Foals and The Three Princesses in the Blue Mountain are both quest tales where the sons go out and the father counts them home, and Son of the Island and the Turtle is the gentler seven-minute version for ages four to eight.

The Wild Swans, adapted from Hans Christian Andersen, is the longest at nine minutes and the one with the most at stake.

Where to start if you want the warm one

The Old Man and His Grandson is eight minutes and covers three generations at one table. It is the story to read when somebody in your house is being impatient with a grandparent, though as ever it works better if nobody says so.

Fairy-tale fathers are rarely wise all the way through, and children enjoy this more than we expect them to. It is one of the few places a story lets a child be right and a grown-up be wrong.

In Rumpelstiltskin the whole disaster begins with a father boasting about what his daughter can do. The Fisherman and His Wife is a man who keeps going back to the sea because he will not have the argument at home. Jack and the Beanstalk and The Boy Who Cried Wolf both leave a boy to work out the consequences on his own.

Worth saying out loud

If your child asks why the father did that, the honest answer — he was frightened, or greedy, or not thinking — is better than defending him. It is also the answer that makes the story worth having read.

A surprising number of these are four to six minute fables with a farmer in them, and they are the easiest way into the theme for a three-to-seven-year-old.

• The Farmer and His Sons — six minutes, and the buried treasure turns out to be the digging.
• The Farmer and the Stork — four minutes on the company you keep.
• The Farmer and the Cranes — four minutes, gentle, ages 3–7.
• The Grasshopper and the Ants — four minutes on thinking ahead.

They are not really about farming. The farmer in a fable is shorthand for somebody who has to make a sensible decision with no one to ask, which is what a father looks like from the outside when you are six. Read two or three together and a small child will start predicting the ending, which is the point at which they have understood the form.

If reading aloud is not yet a habit in your house, start with something short and loud rather than something tender. The Old Man and His Grandson is eight minutes and quietly devastating, but it is not where to begin.

Begin instead with The Farmer and the Stork or Jimmy Scarecrow’s Christmas, both four minutes, both easy to do voices for. Our guide on how to read a bedtime story aloud is written for exactly this, and it takes less time to read than most of the stories on this page.

The companion theme is mothers, and both branch from family. For stories about a child working out who they are while a parent watches, identity overlaps heavily with this page. And if the reading has to happen on a phone at the end of a long day, the five-minute stories page will get you there faster than scrolling this one.