Read to your kids. Every day
The surprising result of our bedtime story ritual
The Twins turn 7 Sunday.
We’ve read to them every night and before naps. Three stories. Three songs. (My working up the courage to “sing” is a topic for another post. Let’s just say they are an accommodating audience.)
It’s a ritual we’ve maintained, and they now enforce, every single night since they came home from the hospital.
That’s a metric sh!t-ton of reading. We figure around 7,600 books.
We’ve been gifted a ton of children’s books, new and secondhand. We’ve bought a few. And we’ve got frequent flyer miles at every public library on the Front Range.
It shows.
They’re in the equivalent of first grade at the local Montessori, and they’re reading at or beyond a third-grade level. A bit of a brag, yes, but it’s genuinely impressive to me.
I have a strange memory from first grade—having to read in front of a group and being mortified to learn I’d been pronouncing “people” wrong the whole time. (Mouse in a Pee-Op-Pel house.)
The teacher didn’t correct me. I only discovered my error when a precocious classmate confidently read it properly when it was her turn.
My daughter is probably playing that precocious role in her class now. Her vocabulary is sometimes downright alarming—she uses and understands words grossly outside where I’d expect a seven-year-old to be.
The science backs this up:
Reading to kids daily means a million more words by kindergarten
It develops phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, and comprehension
Can vouch.
We just started doing this because we wanted to. Because it seemed like the right thing. I had no idea what it would actually teach me.
Revelation One: Show Up
The bedtime routine got a little... routine for me in the early days. It was always nice, but some nights it felt like an obligation after a long hard day at my day job. Three more stories when I was running on fumes.
But they never let us skip. And somewhere around year three, it hit me: the consistency was the point. Not the content of any particular book. The showing up.
You can’t batch parent. You can’t optimize your way to connection. You just have to be there, night after night, reading about llamas in pajamas for the forty-seventh time.
I wasn’t just reading to them. I was choosing presence over convenience, every single night. Without realizing it, I’d been curating my own attention.
Revelation Two: Know What You’re Feeding Them
This one snuck up on me. After a few thousand books, I started noticing patterns. Then opinions. Then strong opinions.
Kids’ books fall into a few categories:
Classics — *Brown Bear*, *Where the Wild Things Are*. These endure for a reason.
Trends — Frozen, Moana, Lego, Star Wars adaptations. Fine. Mostly harmless.
Perennial wisdom — *You Are Stardust*, *Old Turtle*. The ones that make you pause and think.
Allegory — *The Giving Tree*, *The Lorax*. Teaching through story.
Cultural conditioning — You’d be surprised what’s in some of these. Religious, political, ideological. Sometimes subtle, sometimes not.
And within each category, there’s a spectrum from genuinely good to what I can only call kidslop—lazy, weird, sometimes disturbing stuff that somehow got published.
We’ve seen it all. Somewhere along the way, we started skimming the library stack before bedtime, quietly setting aside the ones that didn’t pass muster.
It dawned on me: in an age of infinite books and infinite screens, someone has to choose what goes into those little brains. That someone is you. I’d stumbled into curating their content without ever calling it that.
Revelation Three: Bend the Tools to Your Values
This one surprised me most.
During my early experiments with ChatGPT, I built a custom AI storyteller for the twins—almost as a lark. Screen time at bedtime, AI-generated content... all the things I’m supposed to be skeptical about. And I am.
But something unexpected happened.
The custom GPT generates bedtime stories with Maverick and Cinder as the main characters. It references Fort Collins, tracks the seasons, incorporates upcoming holidays. It builds mythology around family members they don’t see often—so when we visit Uncle G or Mimi and PaPa, the kids already have stories about them in their heads.
They love hearing themselves at the center of an adventure. And I love watching their minds contemplate this strange new tech wizardry while still snuggled up for story time.
Is it perfect? No. I don’t love the phone screen glowing at bedtime. Still working on that. But here’s what I realized: I wasn’t outsourcing bedtime to YouTube. I wasn’t letting the algorithm choose. I’d built a tool that serves our values, not the other way around.
I’d been curating technology without knowing that’s what I was doing. And in a world where AI is going to reshape everything, maybe that’s the real skill to model: using these tools with intention, instead of letting them use you.
The Thread I Didn’t See Coming
Seven years. 7,600 books. Three stories and three songs, every single night.
I didn’t set out to learn anything. I just wanted to read to my kids.
But looking back, the same thread runs through all of it: *curation*.
Curating attention—showing up, even when exhausted.
Curating content—noticing what you’re putting into those hungry little minds.
Curating technology—bending the tools to serve your family instead of the other way around.
In a world of infinite content and infinite distraction, this might be the whole job. Not optimization. Not efficiency. Just... choosing. Again and again. Night after night.
The twins are reading chapter books on their own now. They devour audiobooks on road trips and recall details I’ve long forgotten. They’re seven years old and already better readers than I was at their age.
Worth every llama. Every pajama. Every single night.
~capshaw
Here’s my prompt. Feel free to copy it.
Want to build your own AI storyteller?
Here’s how to create a CustomGPT if you have an OpenAI account. Feel free to copy and remix this for your kids:
Instructions:
You are a bedtime story generator, creating serially related bedtime stories for Maverick and Cinder, twin 7-year-olds living near the mountains in Fort Collins, Colorado.
These stories should relate to each other like episodes and develop major story arcs across multiple stories. Each story should have its own arc, but also contribute to a major arc. Major story arcs should resolve after 3 stories, when a new story arc can be introduced.
Stories should be created for a 3rd grade reading level and be about a 5-10 minute read.
Primary Subjects:
Maverick is a boy with long blond hair. He loves Legos, riding bikes, playing on playgrounds, stuffed animals (stuffies), Moana, and dreams of being an astronaut and a construction worker.
Cinder is a girl with long light blonde hair and shares the love for Legos, bikes, playgrounds, stuffies, and Moana, and adores the Frozen Princesses as well.
Supporting Characters(Frequently featured):
Their cousin Stacy[names changed to protect the innocent], who is 13 and lives in Denver, plays lacrosse and is a beloved part of their lives.
Their grandparents, Mimi and PaPa, travel the country in a large RV and frequently take Maverick and Cinder on fun adventures.
Supporting Characters(Infrequently appearing):
“Uncle Mojo” is a wise wizard who can sometimes come in to help the twins in an adventure if they get stuck. He only comes when they call him and ask for help. He can solve any problem but only speaks in riddles.
“Uncle Porch.” Uncle Porch is a very kind and friendly helper that resembles a happy Buddha. He’ll help the twins if they ever get into an argument or have hurt feelings. Uncle Porch’s knowledge can be referenced here: https://www.metarelating.com/media and every sub-page on this website.
“Uncle G.” Uncle G is daddy’s brother and is the best Uncle ever. Uncle G is a pilot, a surfer, a kitesurfer. Uncle G is really tall and strong. Uncle G drives an adventure van sometimes. Uncle G loves to have fun and go on super exciting adventures. Uncle G can show the twins how to do things they never thought they could do by themselves.
Technical Instructions:
Each story begins with a title that is displayed first.
The stories incorporate relevant details like holidays, the weather, local geography, and towns when it fits the story.
Each story is unique unless a sequel is requested.
After each story, a Disney Pixar style cartoon-style image(or similar) collage is always generated based on key elements of the story. If the story contains elements that are against content policy, these should be not included in the image generation. Logos are also never included in images.
When ‘Tell me a learning story’ is selected, the story will teach third grade reading and math concepts based on the Montessori teaching method. Never teach the same lesson twice, and lessons should progress and build upon previous lessons. Remember all stories and characters from each story.
Characters should develop relationships with the Twins and with other characters if it fits the story progression.
After the story and image are created, present the user with buttons to either ‘Create a Sequel’ or ‘Tell me a new story’.