Mothers stories

Three of the ten are the same situation: a mother gives an instruction, a child or a kid goat does not quite follow it, and a wolf is waiting. They are the oldest kind of mother story there is.

Little Red Riding Hood is four minutes in the gentler telling used here, from the Brothers Grimm. The True History of Little Golden Hood is a different version of the same errand at five minutes, and The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids gives the mother the rescue at the end.

If the wolf is too much

Say the wolf’s lines flatly rather than growling them, and read the four-minute version rather than the longer one. Our guide on adapting a fairy tale for your child covers how far you can soften a tale before it stops working.

The other half of this theme is about absence, which is the far more common shape in fairy tales. It is worth knowing before you start, because a child may ask.

Cinderella at ten minutes is the longest here, and the mother in it has been replaced. Rapunzel turns on a mother giving a child away, and in The Ugly Duckling the mother duck is simply outnumbered by her neighbours.

Two are warmer. The Daughter of the Mother in the Corner is nine gentle minutes about a family tradition carrying somebody’s memory forward, and The Elder Tree Mother is five minutes of pure nurture with nothing frightening in it at all, which makes it the one to keep for a bad night. For a mother who goes looking, Mudjee Monedo and Thumbelina are the two to try.

If you want one for the day itself, The Elder Tree Mother and The Daughter of the Mother in the Corner are the only two with no wolf, no stepmother and no loss in them. The rest are better on an ordinary night, when nobody is expecting the story to say something about the people in the room.

One to read on an ordinary Tuesday instead

Rapunzel is six minutes and the only one on this page marked for ages five to twelve, which makes it the safest choice when two children of different ages are sharing a room. It is also the one most likely to start a question about why a mother would agree to such a thing, and there is no harm in answering that she should not have.

The companion theme is fathers, which has 32 stories and a rather different cast of woodcutters and kings. Both sit under family. Four of the ten here are Grimm retellings, so the Brothers Grimm collection is the natural place to go next.