Dinosaur and Dragon Bedtime Stories

Why does my kid love dinosaurs so much?

You're in good company. In a study of 177 families, nearly a third of young children had what researchers called an extremely intense interest in one topic, and dinosaurs are one of the classics, along with vehicles and machines.

Dinosaurs have everything a small child could want: they're enormous, powerful, real, and safely gone. A four-year-old who can say Parasaurolophus knows something most grown-ups don't, and being the expert feels great.

Are kids who love dinosaurs smarter?

There's no good evidence that loving dinosaurs makes a child more intelligent. What a deep interest does give them is practice: paying attention for longer, remembering lots of details, sorting things into groups and asking follow-up questions. Feeding the interest with books, museum trips and stories is time well spent, whichever topic it turns out to be.

Are dinosaurs too scary for bedtime?

It depends on your child and on the dinosaur. Under-fives are still working out what's real and what could come back, so a roaring T-rex film can stay with them at night. At bedtime, choose plant-eaters, baby dinosaurs, toy dinosaurs, and stories where the dinosaur is the one who needs help. Save the teeth-and-hunting stories for daytime.

If your child is scared, the reassuring fact is simple: dinosaurs lived a very, very long time ago, about 66 million years before today, and none of them can come back. Their closest living relatives are birds, so the sparrow outside the window is a tiny, friendly cousin.

How do I explain dinosaurs to a small child?

Three ideas are enough for a toddler: dinosaurs were real animals, they lived a long, long time ago before any people, and we know about them because their bones turned to stone in the ground. Those stone bones are called fossils.

Older kids love the surprises: some dinosaurs were as small as a chicken, many had feathers, and some cared for their babies in nests.

What is the friendliest dinosaur?

No dinosaur was friendly like a pet, but the plant-eaters didn't hunt anyone, which makes them the gentle choice for bedtime: Triceratops, Stegosaurus and the long-necked giants like Brachiosaurus. Maiasaura, whose name means good mother lizard, nested in big groups and looked after its young, which makes it a lovely bedtime dinosaur.

Are dragons real?

No. Dragons are made-up animals, and people all over the world have told stories about them for thousands of years. Real things may have inspired them, though: in ancient China, big fossil bones dug out of the ground were called dragon bones, and historian Adrienne Mayor argues that fossil finds helped shape legends of monsters and dragons.

There is one real dragon: the Komodo dragon, the biggest lizard alive today, which lives on a few islands in Indonesia. It doesn't fly or breathe fire.