There’s a reason children always ask for “one more story” before sleeping.
It’s just not about the story.
It's the feeling that tags along with it.
Lights off. Fan sound. Someone sitting next to you. And a story that always starts somewhere before you were born.
“When I was your age…”
“In our old house…”
“Your grandfather used to…”
“When we first came to this city…”
These stories don’t feel important when you’re a child. They feel random. Sometimes funny, sometimes boring, sometimes repeated too many times. But years later, you realise those stories quietly built something inside you.
They built a sense of where you come from.
Not in a big, patriotic, history-book way. In a very personal way. You start understanding what kind of family you come from. Who struggled. Who took risks. Who was funny. Who was strict. Who left their hometown. Who built a house. Who studied a lot. Who didn’t get to study. Who fought with whom. Who helped whom.
Slowly, without anyone formally teaching you, you start understanding your place in a long chain of people. Your life doesn’t feel like it started with you. It feels like you joined a story that was already going on.
That feeling is called belonging, but nobody uses that word at home. It just feels like, “This is my family. These are my people. This is where I come from.”
Today, children are growing up with thousands of stories. But most of them are on screens. Characters, fictional worlds, other people’s lives. They clearly know the backstory of movie characters, but clearly not the backstory of their own family.
Ask many children where their grandparents grew up, and they don’t fully know. Ask how their parents met, they don’t know the full story. Ask why their family moved cities, why certain festivals are important, why certain foods are always cooked, why they were given their name, and often the answers are incomplete.
Earlier, these things were known because people kept telling the same stories again and again. On terraces, during power cuts, on long train journeys, after dinner, before sleeping. Stories were not “story time.” Stories were just conversation.
And those conversations quietly told children,
You belong somewhere. You didn’t just appear here. There were many people before you who made your life possible.
That feeling is very important. Children who feel like they belong somewhere usually walk into the world a little more confidently. Not loudly confident. Quietly confident. Like they are carrying an invisible background behind them.
Maybe bedtime stories are not really about sleeping.
Maybe they are about rooting.
So that when children grow up and the world becomes confusing and big and fast, they still know somewhere in their head,
“I come from somewhere. I am part of a story that started before me.”
And sometimes, that feeling is more comforting than any bedtime story itself.
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