Stories about big feelings

This is the collection parents come to with a specific problem rather than a spare twenty minutes. The stories are grouped here by the feeling they handle, because that is how the question arrives.

Worry and fear

The Anxious Leaf is the most direct, five minutes for ages 3–7, and it says plainly that being frightened is allowed and temporary. Chicken Licken at nine minutes does the same job through comedy: the sky is not falling, and everyone panicked for nothing.

Feeling left out or less than

The Ass and the Lapdog is six minutes about watching someone else be favoured. The Birds, the Beasts, and the Bat at seven minutes is about not fitting into either group, which is a specific and painful feeling a seven-year-old can usually name. My Own Self runs ten minutes on the same ground more gently.

Sadness and hard times

A Little Princess is eleven minutes, ages 6–10, retold from Frances Hodgson Burnett, and it is the site's most sustained story about keeping going when everything has got worse. Pandora’s Box at six minutes ends on the fact that hope was in the box too.

The reason these work is not that they teach a lesson. It is that they say the difficult thing out loud in someone else's voice, which is much easier for a child to accept than a conversation that starts "I noticed you seemed upset today".

The Butterfly at five minutes is the best example: it is about change being frightening and worth doing anyway, and it never once addresses the child. Riquet With The Tuft at seven minutes takes on how you look and what that is worth. The Blue Bird, nine minutes for ages 6–10, is about looking everywhere for happiness and finding it at home.

Say nothing at the end. If your child wants to connect it to their own day, they will, and our guide to how stories teach empathy explains why the indirect route does more than the direct one.

Three evenings to avoid

Three situations where you should pick something else. When the feeling is still raw, an hour after the argument, a story about jealousy reads as a telling-off. When your child is overtired, anything that asks for reflection makes bedtime longer. And when they have asked for something funny, give them something funny.

In all three cases take a short, undemanding story from gentle sleepy stories or a loud one from funny bedtime stories, and come back to this page tomorrow, when it is not about anything.

When the problem is not a story problem

If the worry is about the dark, about monsters or about the story itself, fairy tales and fear is the more useful page. For a child who keeps asking about one particular story, reading the same story every night explains what that repetition is doing.

When there is no time to browse, these are the ones to remember. The Bow and the Lyre is three minutes on differences being the point. Goldilocks and The Three Bears at four minutes is quietly about apologising. Lily and the Lion and The Boy Who Cried Wolf both run five.

For anything longer, 10-minute bedtime stories gathers the full-length options, and kindness stories sits next door with a warmer version of much the same material.