You don’t need to be a skilled storyteller to write a good bedtime story for your child, since a phone and an LLM can do most of the preliminary work for you. The easiest method is to use the AI as an assistant for your story, not as your parent.

Start by sharing details about your child’s interests. For instance: “Write a bedtime story of seven minutes’ duration for a six-year-old who is fond of dinosaurs, space, and building things with LEGO. Make sure it is calm, funny, and easy to understand.”

Then get the child to take part in the process.

Ask them to select the main character—this could be a robot, a cat, an astronaut, or even their favorite toy. Also let them choose the location and one problem the character has to solve. Then you can input those choices into the LLM and create a brand-new story together.

You can also make the story educational. Whenever your child is studying topics such as the planets, animals, numbers, emotions, or even a new language, ask the model to incorporate those ideas naturally rather than presenting them as a lesson.

A good method is interactive storytelling: read a few paragraphs, then pause and ask your child what should happen next. Feed the LLM your child’s answer, then continue the story from that point. As a result, bedtime becomes something the child helps create rather than something they passively experience.

You could also ask the model to alter its style. For example, you might say, “Use shorter sentences,” or “Write it in a way that is appropriate for a five-year-old,” or “Explain any difficult words,” or “Include three questions that I can ask at the end,” or “Alter the ending to be calmer since the purpose is for bedtime.”

If a child prefers listening to stories over reading them, you can make the experience more like a conversation by using the voice features available in many AI apps.

What I would steer clear of is giving out too much personal information about the child; things like their actual name, the name of their school, their address, private family details, or any other sensitive information are not necessary if you want to write a good story.

Technology may be useful, but the valuable part remains human.

AI can create the characters and the plot; you give it the voice, the expressions, the questions, the laughter, and the few minutes of concentrated attention your child will actually remember.

It’s easy for a phone to become another screen that divides parents from their children.

Used differently, it can also serve as a storytelling tool and bring them together.