Sleep stories for kidsWalk them to sleep.

It started on paper

Every film here is a walk. It begins somewhere warm and ends somewhere quiet, and the eight places always arrive in the same order — the order water travels, from a spring to the sea. Once you have set off, nothing asks your child a question. That is the whole design. Choosing is cognitive work, and cognitive work wakes people up, so the only decision is made at the door, by you, before the first picture appears.

Bedtime stories for toddlers need to be shorter than most people expect. A toddler who is already tired cannot hold a plot, and a story that keeps introducing things is a story that keeps waking them. Ours run three to five minutes, use perhaps forty words a minute, and end on a held frame of somebody already sleeping. If you are looking for bedtime stories for toddlers specifically, start at The Sleepy Forest or Tardy’s Bedroom and stop after one.

Sleep stories for kids who are past that stage can be longer, because an older child will follow a route and enjoy knowing where they are on it. The long pieces run thirty minutes or more, take in several places, and never raise their voice. There is no music sting, no reveal, and nothing that reads as an event. The most exciting thing that happens in a good sleep story is that a bear sits down.

Underneath all of it is the Sleep Ladder, which is simply a way of describing how far along someone is: settling, a little sleepy, very sleepy, the big yawn, and then sleep. The language descends as the ladder does, and it never climbs back up. You will notice the pictures dim and slow at the same rate, because the words and the light are driven by the same number.

One rule we will not break, and it is worth knowing before you press play. Nothing we make will ever tell your child to fall asleep. Going to sleep is a thing a person can practise and get better at, so we are happy to ask for it. Falling asleep is involuntary, and telling somebody to do an involuntary thing only creates the effort that prevents it. So Tardy observes it happening to somebody else, and never once instructs it.

Browsing is free and there is nothing to install. An account is only needed to press play, and the reason is small and practical: it is how we keep the place your child got to, so tomorrow night starts where tonight stopped. One account per household, held by you. If you want the reasoning rather than the films — the read-aloud markup, the pacing, why the route runs the way it does — that is all written down for parents. Otherwise, pick a place, and walk them to sleep.