How long should a bedtime story be?

Nobody asks this question in the abstract. They ask it at twenty past seven, holding a book, with a child who has already been in the bath twice.

So here is the practical answer first: five to ten minutes for a three to five year old, ten to fifteen for a six to eight year old, and as long as you can both stand for anybody older. Then the reasons, which matter more than the numbers, because the numbers change with the evening.

Length is not really about attention span

The received wisdom is that small children cannot concentrate for long. That is true of a lecture and largely untrue of a story. A three year old will sit through twenty minutes of something they are gripped by and fidget through four minutes of something they are not.

What actually sets the length at bedtime is different, and it is worth naming because it changes what you do about it:

• How wound up they are. A child who has had a birthday party is not going to settle into a long story, and trying is how bedtime becomes a fight.
• How much is left in you. A story read by somebody desperate for it to end is a worse story than a shorter one read properly. Children detect this instantly.
• Whether the story has a clean place to stop. This is the big one, and it is the one you can actually control.

The stopping point matters more than the length

Most bedtime arguments are not about the story being too short. They are about it ending in the wrong place.

A chapter that finishes a thing, somebody gets somewhere, a question gets answered, a door gets opened, is a chapter a child can be satisfied by. A chapter that stops because you have run out of patience halfway down a page is not an ending, it is an interruption, and children are right to object to it.

So the useful skill at bedtime is not reading faster. It is looking ahead two pages and deciding where tonight ends before you start.

The end of a chapter is a real ending. The bottom of page fourteen is not.

A rough shape by age

Three to five. Five minutes, one idea, and a lot of repetition. At this age the story is a routine as much as a narrative, and the repetition is the part they join in with. A very short story read with your whole attention is worth more than a long one.

Six to eight. Ten to fifteen minutes, which is usually one proper chapter. This is the age where “one more chapter” starts, and where having a clean chapter ending to point at becomes genuinely useful.

Nine to twelve. Whatever you both want, and increasingly they will read ahead without you. Reading aloud to a confident reader is still worth doing: they can follow a story a year or two beyond what they can comfortably read themselves, which is where the good books are.

What to do when it will not stop

Three things that work better than negotiating:

1. Say the stopping point before you start. “Two chapters, then lights off.” Announced in advance it is a rule. Announced at the end it is a disappointment.
2. Finish on something answered, not something asked. If the chapter ends on a cliffhanger you have created the problem yourself.
3. Let the next bit be tomorrow’s, out loud. “I want to know what is behind the door too. Tomorrow.” That is a promise rather than a refusal, and it usually lands.

If you are making it up as you go

Inventing a story on demand is much harder than reading one, and the length question gets worse: there is no page count to aim at and no chapter end to head for.

This is exactly what Taleium is for. You and your child decide what happens next, and the chapter that comes back is written to the age you chose, which means it is already about the right length and already ends somewhere the next one can pick up from. It will also read itself aloud, at four different speeds, for the evenings when your voice has gone.

The story does not run out. But it does stop, cleanly, every night, which is the part that actually matters.