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What our stories are built on

We design our stories using approaches from child psychology for each age. Every book practises one skill in concrete steps; the step is taken by the hero — your child; the last page shows the same step in everyday life; and the skill is revisited later. For each topic we state the approach, how strongly research supports it, and the sources.

A work desk with a sketchbook full of comic storyboards, a ruler with age bands, books and a cup of tea.
Imagination with a research foundation.
01 · Story principles

15 principles behind every story we write

Each principle is grounded in published research. Every source links to the study (DOI).

  1. One skill, broken into steps

    Each book practises one thing in 2–3 visible steps, and the technique comes back. In a meta-analysis of 213 school programmes (270,034 pupils), programmes that were sequenced, active, focused and explicit had better results; a more recent meta-analysis shows that a lot depends on implementation quality.

    Durlak et al. 2011⁠; Cipriano et al. 2023

  2. A step from real life

    The magical world is the frame, but the moment of decision looks like home, school or the playground. Preschoolers transferred solutions more from realistic stories and real people than from fantasy.

    Walker et al. 2015⁠; Richert et al. 2009⁠; Richert & Smith 2011

  3. A human hero takes the step — the child

    A dragon can be a friend, not the teacher. A sharing story with human characters increased preschoolers’ giving; the same story with animals did not (one study, read by an adult).

    Larsen et al. 2018

  4. A metaphor and plain words

    At the end, the “dragon breath” is also said plainly: “I breathe out slowly three times.” Young children take morals literally and often don’t work out a story’s moral theme on their own, even in grades 3 and 5.

    Mares & Acosta 2008⁠; Narvaez et al. 1998⁠; Narvaez et al. 1999

  5. “Why?” inside the story, not a sermon

    A character wonders out loud, and the hero’s answer only comes after the page turn, so the child has time to think it through. In an experiment it helped when the child did the explaining; persuasion and a controlling tone can trigger resistance.

    Walker & Lombrozo 2017⁠; Strouse et al. 2013⁠; Steindl et al. 2015⁠; Van Petegem et al. 2015

  6. Feelings are allowed, hurting is not

    We name the feeling and the adult in the story acknowledges it. We build on emotion coaching; parenting programmes that teach it improved how parents handled emotions and reduced behaviour problems as rated by teachers.

    Gottman et al. 1996⁠; Havighurst et al. 2010⁠; Havighurst et al. 2013

  7. Agreements, not blind obedience

    Rules in the story have a reason, and the child may say “no” to anyone who hurts them. Later internalisation of rules was predicted by willing compliance, not compliance under supervision; warmth with clear rules is linked to fewer problems (the effects are small).

    Kochanska et al. 1995⁠; Pinquart 2017⁠; Gershoff & Grogan-Kaylor 2016

  8. No punishment, shame or rewards

    A mistake is something you did, not “you’re bad”, and nobody in the story gets sweets for good behaviour. Shame leads to avoidance rather than making amends, and material rewards promised in advance weaken intrinsic interest — more in children than in adults.

    Tangney et al. 2007⁠; Deci et al. 1999⁠; Warneken & Tomasello 2008

  9. Telling the truth pays off

    When someone owns up, the story first values the truth and only then deals with the damage. A story with a good outcome for honesty increased immediate confessions in 3–7-year-olds; scare stories about lying did not, and a punitive environment was linked to more lying.

    Lee et al. 2014⁠; Talwar & Lee 2011

  10. We praise actions and approach, not talent

    The hero wins through a plan, practice and teamwork, not because they are “the best” — and no labels. Praise for intelligence led fifth-graders to persist less after failure; an identity appeal (“be a helper”) backfired after setbacks.

    Mueller & Dweck 1998⁠; Brummelman et al. 2014⁠; Foster-Hanson et al. 2020

  11. Interactivity only when it serves the story

    No mini-games or tap-and-click extras in the middle of reading. In a meta-analysis of 43 studies, games and detours in e-books distracted from comprehension.

    Takacs et al. 2015

  12. Suspense matched to age

    No scary transformations for 3–5-year-olds, care for 6–8, always resolved within the same story; fear is never used as a parenting tool. Children in a study most often attributed their fears to information — which includes stories.

    Muris et al. 2000⁠; Sparks & Cantor 1986

  13. The group, and an adult who acts

    With exclusion and teasing we also show bystanders who can safely stand up for others; bullying is not “a fight between two”, and an adult acts. Friendship with someone “different” is a source of strength in the plot, not of pity.

    Salmivalli et al. 1996⁠; Kärnä et al. 2011⁠; Polanin et al. 2012⁠; Cameron et al. 2006

  14. AI is not a therapist or a friend

    Children don’t chat with AI. A person reads every brief; if a child discloses something serious, production stops and the disclosure is never drawn. In a study, chatbots could not tell apart intermediate levels of suicide risk — so a crisis is never handled by AI alone.

    McBain et al. 2025⁠; Kurian 2025⁠; NSPCC Learning

  15. A coping hero

    Children also learn by watching others. Our hero — your child — shows how to try different approaches, cope with mistakes and ask for help. That’s why it doesn’t have to work out straight away in the story. In one series of studies (children aged 10–11, maths) children learned more from a peer who made mistakes and gradually succeeded than from a “master”.

    Schunk et al. 1987⁠; Schunk 1987

A boy shows a baby dragon how to breathe out slowly.
From stories to everyday life

How your child learns in a story — and why it needs no work from you

The story carries the learning: the hero meets the skill, tries it in a harder moment with the words your child came up with, and at the end uses it alone and helps another character. Interactivity happens only outside reading — games in the middle of a story reduce comprehension. Talking with a parent is an optional bonus that may strengthen the effect, not a requirement.

02 · A story that grows with your child

By age: what development means for the story

Development has no sharp edges — the bands are a guide. Every claim has a source.

3–5 years

Preschooler

4–6 pages

What children usually manage

  • Understanding that others can believe something different (false belief) develops at exactly this age — plots built on a mistake are hard. Wellman et al. 2001
  • Transfers a solution from a story more easily when the world is realistic and the characters are people. Richert et al. 2009⁠; Walker et al. 2015
  • Mostly scared by what looks scary; comforted by action (light, a hug). Sparks & Cantor 1986

What this means for the story

  • One simple thing, also said in one sentence by the hero.
  • Gentle suspense resolved within the same story, few characters.
  • Feelings named out loud; an adult reads the comic.
6–8 years

Beginning reader

6–10 pages

What children usually manage

  • Manages second-order “thinking about thinking” (“Emma thinks that Jake thinks…”) and a plot with a secret. Perner & Wimmer 1985
  • Often doesn’t work out the point alone; a “why did she do that?” question that they answer themselves helps. Walker & Lombrozo 2017⁠; Narvaez et al. 1999
  • In a study with 190 children, fears and scary dreams peaked at ages 7–9. Muris et al. 2000

What this means for the story

  • A full arc: complication, realisation, a step to copy.
  • A “why?” question in the plot, answered after the page turn.
  • Mistakes are normal and can be fixed; nobody is “the bad one”.
9–11 years

Independent reader

8–14 pages

What children usually manage

What this means for the story

  • A dilemma with no single right answer; the point comes from the consequences.
  • A bystander who stands up for someone safely.
  • The hero wins through planning, practice and teamwork; a short naming of the step at the end.
12–14 years

Young teen

8–14 pages

What children usually manage

What this means for the story

  • No lectures — a dilemma and the hero’s own judgement.
  • The hero is never humiliated in public.
  • Less childish styles, genuine humour.
03

What research doesn’t support — so we don’t promise it

Honesty is part of expertise. These claims would sell well, but research doesn’t back them:

  • That reading alone changes behaviour

    In the experiments on prosocial behaviour we reviewed, an adult read or led the session. Without an adult, the evidence is mainly for comprehension and vocabulary — and for narrated multimedia stories that children listened to (meta-analysis of 29 studies); independent reading was not tested. Our comic’s effect on behaviour has not yet been tested — which doesn’t mean it doesn’t work; that’s why we will test it.

    Takacs et al. 2014⁠; Larsen et al. 2018

  • That reading “increases empathy”

    A meta-analysis of 14 studies (adults) found only a small effect of fiction on social understanding (g ≈ 0.15), and a well-known study in Science did not replicate.

    Dodell-Feder & Tamir 2018⁠; Panero et al. 2016

  • Better grades or a “growth mindset”

    Mindset programmes had an average effect on school results of d = 0.05, not significant after correction.

    Macnamara & Burgoyne 2023⁠; Sisk et al. 2018

  • Treating anxiety, ADHD or bullying

    Anxiety disorders are treated with cognitive behavioural therapy by a professional. A 2015 review of creative “bibliotherapy” with children included only 8 randomised trials, too varied to combine in a meta-analysis. The comic is not therapy.

    James et al. 2020⁠; Montgomery & Maunders 2015

  • That personalisation teaches by itself

    In some small studies with preschoolers, children remembered new words or retold the story better from a personalised book; other studies found no advantage. This hasn’t been tested with older children. The studies we reviewed don’t directly establish that a photo-based cartoon likeness improves learning — so we don’t promise it.

    Kucirkova et al. 2014⁠; Neuenschwander et al. 2025⁠; Cho & Yim 2024

  • That “saying no” prevents abuse

    School programmes to prevent sexual abuse mainly improved knowledge (24 studies, 5,802 children); the effect on disclosure is uncertain, and only 2 studies looked at protective behaviour. That’s why, when someone is being hurt, an adult in the story always acts.

    Walsh et al. 2015

  • Myths about “willpower”

    A large 23-lab replication of “ego depletion” found d = 0.04, and the link between the marshmallow test and later outcomes shrank by two thirds after accounting for background.

    Hagger et al. 2016⁠; Watts et al. 2018

What we deliberately don’t do — and why

Homework for parents

We design stories to model the steps on their own; we have not yet tested whether children remember and use them. Talking with you is an optional bonus — parents’ questions during shared viewing helped comprehension. An adult reads to the youngest children. Strouse et al. 2013

A moral from an adult’s mouth (“you see, that’s why…”)

Lecturing can trigger resistance; it helped more when the child did the explaining. Steindl et al. 2015⁠; Walker & Lombrozo 2017

Handing the key step to an animal

Weaker transfer to real life. Larsen et al. 2018

Points, badges, reading streaks

Rewards undermine intrinsic interest, and manipulative design is common in children’s apps. Deci et al. 1999⁠; Radesky et al. 2022

Scare tactics and punishment stories

Children attribute fears to information, including stories; stories that scare children about the consequences of lying didn’t work. Muris et al. 2000⁠; Lee et al. 2014

Labels (“you’re a liar”, “you’re a helper”)

An identity appeal backfired after setbacks. Foster-Hanson et al. 2020

Games in the middle of reading

They reduce story comprehension. Takacs et al. 2015

Bullying as “a fight between two”, forced reconciliation

Bullying is repeated hurting with an imbalance of power; automatic punishments are not supported by data. Olweus 2013⁠; APA 2008

Transcripts of what the child wrote as “monitoring”

Parents know most about their children from what children choose to tell them. Stattin & Kerr 2000

Self-harm, depression, or body and weight as a story topic

These belong with professionals, not in a comic. NICE 2022⁠; NICE 2019

04 · Human review

Who oversees it

A person checks every page

Every single comic is checked page by page by a person on our team before it is sent: story, pictures, speech bubbles and the real-life step. Nothing goes out without it.

A person reads the brief first

A person reads your child’s whole brief before anything is written or drawn. If a child discloses something serious, production pauses.

Rules for the AI

The AI writes following our principles for each topic and age; we never use invented citations or figures. Each topic shows its review date.

What we don’t have yet — and we say so

  • Testing our comic with children A pilot is in preparation: does the child understand the step on the last page? Can they explain it a week later? No scoring of children, and only with parental consent.
  • Abstracts of every source For some sources we have so far only verified the bibliographic details. For those we quote no numbers, and we label them.

Selected sources

Full lists with DOIs are on our Sources page and on each topic page. We cite only sources whose existence we have verified, and always state the type of study.

  1. Durlak, J. A., Weissberg, R. P., Dymnicki, A. B., Taylor, R. D., & Schellinger, K. B. (2011). The impact of enhancing students' social and emotional learning: A meta-analysis of school-based universal interventions. Child Development, 82(1), 405–432. doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01564.x abstract
  2. Cipriano, C., et al. (2023). The state of evidence for social and emotional learning: A contemporary meta-analysis of universal school-based SEL interventions. Child Development, 94(5), 1181–1204. doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13968 abstract
  3. Walker, C. M., Gopnik, A., & Ganea, P. A. (2015). Learning to learn from stories: Children's developing sensitivity to the causal structure of fictional worlds. Child Development, 86(1), 310–318. doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12287 abstract
  4. Richert, R. A., & Smith, E. I. (2011). Preschoolers' quarantining of fantasy stories. Child Development, 82(4), 1106–1119. doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01603.x abstract
  5. Larsen, N. E., Lee, K., & Ganea, P. A. (2018). Do storybooks with anthropomorphized animal characters promote prosocial behaviors in young children? Developmental Science, 21(3), e12590. doi.org/10.1111/desc.12590 abstract
  6. Narvaez, D., Gleason, T., Mitchell, C., & Bentley, J. (1999). Moral theme comprehension in children. Journal of Educational Psychology, 91(3), 477–487. doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.91.3.477 abstract
  7. Walker, C. M., & Lombrozo, T. (2017). Explaining the moral of the story. Cognition, 167, 266–281. doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2016.11.007 abstract
  8. Steindl, C., Jonas, E., Sittenthaler, S., Traut-Mattausch, E., & Greenberg, J. (2015). Understanding psychological reactance. Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 223(4), 205–214. doi.org/10.1027/2151-2604/a000222 abstract
  9. Gottman, J. M., Katz, L. F., & Hooven, C. (1996). Parental meta-emotion philosophy and the emotional life of families. Journal of Family Psychology, 10(3), 243–268. doi.org/10.1037/0893-3200.10.3.243 metadata
  10. Kochanska, G., Aksan, N., & Koenig, A. L. (1995). A longitudinal study of the roots of preschoolers' conscience: Committed compliance and emerging internalization. Child Development, 66(6), 1752. doi.org/10.2307/1131908 abstract
  11. Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. M. (1999). A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 125(6), 627–668. doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.125.6.627 abstract
  12. Takacs, Z. K., Swart, E. K., & Bus, A. G. (2015). Benefits and pitfalls of multimedia and interactive features in technology-enhanced storybooks: A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 85(4), 698–739. doi.org/10.3102/0034654314566989 abstract
  13. Muris, P., Merckelbach, H., Gadet, B., & Moulaert, V. (2000). Fears, worries, and scary dreams in 4- to 12-year-old children: Their content, developmental pattern, and origins. Journal of Clinical Child Psychology, 29(1), 43–52. doi.org/10.1207/s15374424jccp2901_5 abstract
  14. Lee, K., Talwar, V., McCarthy, A., Ross, I., Evans, A., & Arruda, C. (2014). Can classic moral stories promote honesty in children? Psychological Science, 25(8), 1630–1636. doi.org/10.1177/0956797614536401 abstract
  15. Mueller, C. M., & Dweck, C. S. (1998). Praise for intelligence can undermine children's motivation and performance. JPSP, 75(1), 33–52. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.75.1.33 abstract
  16. Foster-Hanson, E., Cimpian, A., Leshin, R. A., & Rhodes, M. (2020). Asking children to "be helpers" can backfire after setbacks. Child Development, 91(1), 236–248. doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13147 abstract
  17. Dodell-Feder, D., & Tamir, D. I. (2018). Fiction reading has a small positive impact on social cognition: A meta-analysis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147(11), 1713–1727. doi.org/10.1037/xge0000395 abstract
  18. Macnamara, B. N., & Burgoyne, A. P. (2023). Do growth mindset interventions impact students' academic achievement? Psychological Bulletin, 149(3–4), 133–173. doi.org/10.1037/bul0000352 abstract
  19. Walsh, K., Zwi, K., Woolfenden, S., & Shlonsky, A. (2015). School-based education programmes for the prevention of child sexual abuse. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2015(4), CD004380. doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD004380.pub3 abstract
  20. Radesky, J., et al. (2022). Prevalence and characteristics of manipulative design in mobile applications used by children. JAMA Network Open, 5(6), e2217641. doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.17641 abstract

All sources cited on this website (135)

Articles for parents

The same rules apply to our articles: numbers only from verified studies, the type of study with every claim, sources with DOIs.

How should you praise a child so the praise really helps?Do children learn anything from stories? What research says about stories and behaviourWhat to do when your child lies? Why punishment doesn’t encourage honestyHow do you talk to your child about a disabled classmate?How to protect your child from online groomingSomeone is blackmailing my child with a photo: what to do nowFirst phone: what to agree with your childSocial media and comparison: what we know about 10–14sHow to help an angry child: what works by age?

How it works

Anger and calming downFriends and being left outFriendship and disabilityTelling a trusted adultSiblingsLosing and mistakesFear and courageTidying upAgreements and listening

See the hero on the drawing before you pay.

Send a brief — we draw your child as the hero for free. Then a story for €9.90 (1 story · 16 pages) or a whole adventure for €24.90 (3 stories · 48 pages), as a storybook or a comic, paid once. Until you open the book, you can cancel it and we refund the full amount.

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