Custom Bedtime Story Framework

---
name: custom-bedtime-story-framework
description: >
  Use this skill to write original bedtime stories for a specific child, personalized by
  name, interests, and tonight's mood. This skill enforces the structural, voice, and
  safety rules that make a story actually work at bedtime — ramp-down structure, sensory
  language, no unresolved fear, gentle homecoming endings, and rules for continuing a
  story across multiple nights. Use this any time a parent or caregiver asks for a
  bedtime story for a child, asks for "a story for my kid," or asks to continue a story
  from a previous night.
usage: /bedtime-story
triggers:
  - "tell my kid a bedtime story"
  - "write a bedtime story about/for [child]"
  - "continue the bedtime story from last night"
  - "make a story for a [age]-year-old who loves [thing]"
  - any request for a short story for a child at bedtime
---

# Custom Bedtime Story Framework

This skill is a playbook for writing a specific kind of short story: the bedtime story. It is not general-purpose storytelling. A bedtime story has a narrow, specific job — to leave a child quieter at the end than they were at the start — and that job constrains almost every creative choice. Follow the rules below. Break them only with a clear reason and never in ways that would leave a child wired or scared.

## 1. The inputs you need before writing

Every bedtime story needs three things from the parent. If any are missing, ask for them in a single message:

1. **Child's name and approximate age.** (Example: "Maya, 6.") Age is non-negotiable because vocabulary and sentence length depend on it.
2. **Two or three things the child loves right now.** (Example: "dinosaurs, the color purple, her stuffed rabbit named Pillow.") These become the story's load-bearing details. The more specific, the better.
3. **Tonight's mood.** Offer four options plainly: adventurous, cozy, silly, or a little bit spooky (the kind that's fun but doesn't keep anyone awake). Default to cozy if unspecified.

You do not ask about plot. You do not ask about setting. Those are your job, not the parent's.

## 2. The four-beat structure

Every story you write uses these four beats, in this order, with these approximate proportions. This is non-negotiable.

### Beat 1: Setup (about 20% of word count)

Place the child-hero somewhere specific. Their own bedroom. A field behind a familiar house. A small, warm, well-lit corner of a larger place. Use exactly one or two sensory details — the smell of bread, the sound of a screen door, the feel of cold grass. Establish that the world is calm. Nothing is wrong yet.

### Beat 2: The thing (about 20%)

Something small and interesting appears or happens. A tiny door in a wall. A map that falls out of a book. A small animal in need of help. A strange, soft glow from inside a drawer. The child-hero notices it and — on their own, without being told — decides to go see.

The "thing" should be interesting in a low-key way, not thrilling. A glowing map is right. An explosion is wrong.

### Beat 3: The turn (about 40%)

Something goes gently sideways. This is where the action of the story lives, but "action" here means problem-solving, not peril. The map leads somewhere unexpected. The animal is lost. The door closes. The child-hero has to figure something out.

**This is where you use the child's interests.** If they love dinosaurs, their knowledge of dinosaurs is what helps them solve the problem. If they love the color purple, the purple thing is the clue. If they love a specific stuffed animal, the stuffed animal has the idea. Reward real-world interests with in-story competence. Kids remember that the story knew what they loved. This is the single most important craft rule in the framework.

### Beat 4: Homecoming (about 20%)

The child-hero makes it back. The world gets quiet. End with one still, specific image that could be the last frame of a picture book: a window, a porch light, a warm lamp, a blanket settling, the sound of a parent's footsteps in the hall.

The last sentence must be one you could read in a whisper. If you read the last sentence and it has exclamation energy, rewrite it.

## 3. Voice rules

- **Age-appropriate vocabulary.** For a 5-year-old, short sentences and familiar words. For an 8-year-old, slightly richer vocabulary and occasional longer sentences. For a 10-year-old, you can stretch further — metaphor, internal emotion, more complex sentences. Never talk down, but also never use a word a kid wouldn't recognize and couldn't guess from context.
- **Sensory language.** At least one sensory detail per beat — something you can see, hear, smell, feel, or taste. Bedtime stories settle faster when they have texture. Abstract stories keep kids awake.
- **Active verbs.** "Maya pushed the door open" beats "the door was pushed open by Maya."
- **Rhythm.** Mix short sentences and longer ones. Read every paragraph aloud in your head. If it clunks, rewrite it.
- **Name usage.** Use the child's name roughly once per paragraph — enough that they feel like the hero, not so much that it becomes a tic.

## 4. Hard constraints — never violate

- **No physical harm to the child-hero.** Stubbed toes, fine. Anything more, no.
- **No genuinely cruel villains.** Antagonists are misunderstood, stuck, grumpy, or hungry. Never malicious toward children.
- **No death of a parent, sibling, or pet.** Not in a bedtime story.
- **No real-world fears.** Break-ins, kidnapping, abandonment, illness, getting lost from a parent. Off-limits.
- **No cliffhangers.** Every story resolves fully tonight. Even serial stories end each night at a resting point.
- **No unresolved fear.** If something a little scary appears — a shadow, a noise, a lost feeling — it must be named and put to rest before the end.
- **No moralizing.** Never end with "and the lesson is…" or "and that's why we should always…". Trust the story to do its work.
- **No commercial characters.** No Spider-Man, no Elsa, no Pokémon. If a child loves Spider-Man, write a story about a kid who loves climbing and has a deep sense of fairness.
- **No big-laugh or big-surprise endings.** The story ramps down, not up.

## 5. Continuing a story across nights

Serial bedtime stories are one of the most-requested and most-mishandled cases. When a parent asks you to continue a story from last night, do this:

1. **Ask what the child remembers.** "Before we start tonight — what does your kid remember about last night's adventure? Even one detail is enough." This is the entire trick. It gives the child a moment of pride (they get to tell you the story first), and it tells you what to continue with.
2. **Do not try to exactly match your own prior output.** You are not a database. Work with what the child remembers as the canonical version. If they remember the dragon was green, the dragon is green from now on, even if yesterday's story said blue.
3. **End each night at a resting point.** The child-hero sleeps, or gets home, or finds a safe place. Never end a serial night mid-adventure. The pattern is: mini-resolution tonight, bigger arc continues tomorrow.
4. **Don't let the arc sprawl.** After roughly three nights on the same arc, start pointing toward a bigger resolution. After five nights, resolve it fully and offer the parent a fresh start.

## 6. What this skill does NOT do

- It does not write daytime stories, school projects, or stories for a child who's supposed to stay awake for them.
- It does not write stories longer than about 900 words. A 3 to 5-minute read-aloud is the cap.
- It does not write stories for children under 3 — those need a different form (rhyming, shorter, more repetitive), and this framework isn't built for it. If asked, say so and hand off: "This framework is tuned for kids roughly 4 and up. For toddlers, you might want a nursery-rhyme-style approach instead."
- It does not write stories for adults, teens, or parodies. If the request drifts there, say so plainly and ask if they'd like a regular story instead.

If a request is outside scope, respond: "This skill is specifically tuned for bedtime stories for kids roughly 4 to 11. What you're asking for is a different kind of story — I can help, but I'd want to drop the bedtime framework to do it."

## 7. Worked example: Maya, age 6, loves dinosaurs, a little bit scared of the dark

**Inputs received:**
- Child: Maya, 6
- Interests: dinosaurs, her stuffed rabbit Pillow
- Mood: a little bit spooky (the fun kind)
- Note: she's a bit scared of the dark

**Story (applying the framework beat by beat):**

> Maya's bedroom was very dark, the way it always was at bedtime, except tonight the dark was making a soft humming sound.
>
> She sat up. Pillow was tucked under her arm, his long ears flopped over her wrist. The humming wasn't coming from the closet. It wasn't coming from under the bed. It was coming, she realized, from the pocket of her jeans, which were crumpled on the floor where she'd left them.
>
> Maya slid out of bed and picked up the jeans. She reached into the pocket. She pulled out a small, warm, round stone that she did not remember putting there, and the stone glowed a steady, friendly green.
>
> "Pillow," Maya whispered, "I think this is a dinosaur egg."
>
> *(Setup complete — calm room, one sensory detail (humming), the child-hero noticing something. The thing has arrived.)*
>
> The egg was not big enough to be a real dinosaur egg, she knew that. Maya knew a lot about dinosaurs. She knew sauropods laid eggs about the size of a grapefruit, and that hadrosaurs built nests in big circles on the ground, and that even the biggest dinosaur egg was not as big as a basketball. This egg was about the size of a lemon. But it was glowing, and it was humming, and it was very warm.
>
> The humming got louder. The glow got a little brighter. And then the egg — gently, not scary, just steadily — floated up out of Maya's hand and drifted to the bedroom window.
>
> *(The thing is fully in play. The child-hero is engaged.)*
>
> Maya followed. She carried Pillow. The egg bumped softly against the window like it wanted to be let out, so Maya pushed the window open — she'd never been allowed to do that before, but tonight felt like a night when the rules were a little different — and the egg drifted out into the yard.
>
> There, on the grass, was a very small, very lost baby dinosaur.
>
> It was about the size of a cat. It had tiny arms, a long tail, and a face that looked almost embarrassed. It made a sound that was not a roar but a kind of peep.
>
> "Oh," said Maya, very quietly. "You're looking for your mom."
>
> The baby dinosaur peeped again.
>
> *(Turn beginning: the problem has arrived. Maya's dinosaur knowledge is about to matter.)*
>
> Maya thought fast. She knew that baby dinosaurs, especially hadrosaurs, which this one looked a little bit like, followed their mothers by the sound of the mother's low call. She didn't have a mother dinosaur. But she had something just as good: her voice, and a stuffed rabbit who had, over the years, heard a lot of her lowest, calmest, most-like-a-dinosaur humming.
>
> Maya sat down on the cold grass. Pillow sat next to her. And Maya hummed — the same steady, friendly hum the egg had been making — low and warm, the way a mother sauropod might hum across a valley at dusk.
>
> The baby dinosaur stopped peeping. It walked, on very unsteady legs, right up to Maya, and it sat down, and it closed its eyes.
>
> *(The child-hero used what she loves — dinosaurs — to solve the problem. This is the payoff of the personalization.)*
>
> "Okay," Maya whispered. "I think your mom is coming." And as she said it, the glow in the sky above the yard got a little deeper, and a very big, very calm shadow moved across the top of the trees, and a low, warm, answering hum came back down through the leaves. The baby opened its eyes, peeped once, and padded off toward the sound, its tiny tail dragging a line through the dewy grass.
>
> Maya stood up. Pillow was still tucked under her arm. The yard was quiet again. Inside her bedroom, through the open window, she could see her reading lamp still on, small and warm.
>
> She climbed back through the window. She closed it gently. She climbed into bed.
>
> The dark in her room was still dark, but it was a different kind of dark now — the kind that has a reading lamp in it, and a stuffed rabbit, and the warm feeling of someone who just helped somebody smaller find their way home.
>
> Maya closed her eyes.
>
> Outside, very far away, a very big dinosaur was humming her baby to sleep.
>
> *(Homecoming: calm, specific image, last sentence readable in a whisper. Fear of the dark has been gently reframed — the dark is now the place where good, quiet things are happening. No moral. No "and that's why." The story did the work.)*

This worked example demonstrates every rule in action. Use it as your calibration baseline.