August 9, 2026
What's New: Social Stories for the Dentist, a New Baby, and the First Day of School
Until this month, every Z Tales story started with a world: dragons, space, the ocean. That's lovely on an ordinary Tuesday. It is very little use the night before the dentist.
The past two weeks changed what this is for.
Tell it what's actually happening
The story builder now has a list of 36 real situations — the dentist, a haircut, a new baby, starting preschool, moving house, a lost toy, a pet who died, sleeping in their own bed, a parent going away for a few days.
Pick one and the story is set in your child's actual life: their bedroom, their kitchen, the real waiting room. Not an enchanted forest.
That sounds small and it was most of the work. Before this, choosing "a new sibling" got you a unicorn who also had a new sibling — a perfectly nice story that does almost nothing for a four-year-old worried about their house. A story only rehearses something if it is recognisably the same thing.
The stories are written differently too. They describe what will happen, in order, including the parts that aren't nice — the chair leaning back, the very bright light, the bits of hair down your neck — because a child who knows what something will feel like has far less left to invent. And they don't tell your child how to feel about it. There's no moral at the end. Nobody is being fixed.
Choosing a situation also makes the builder shorter — two steps instead of three, because the situation replaces the lesson. And the card at the end now gives you one small thing to do tomorrow. "Count their teeth together, slowly, out loud" before the dentist. *"Say when you'll be back, in a way they can measure. Then say it again"* before you go away.
Free social stories, and somewhere to find them
There's a new page at ztales.com/social-stories collecting 35 free stories in one place, grouped by what your child is facing: something coming up, something changing, something frightening, something that has already happened.
The stories were always there. What was missing was the word. "Social story" is what teachers, occupational therapists and paediatricians call these — it's what parents are told to go and find — and not one page on this site used the phrase. The people looking hardest for exactly this were the least likely to land on it.
One thing worth being precise about: Carol Gray's Social Stories™ is a specific method with its own criteria and training, and these are not that. They don't claim to be, and they aren't endorsed by her. They're written to the same underlying idea — describe what will happen, in order, honestly — and they're no substitute for guidance from your child's therapist or paediatrician.
Print any of them
Every free story on the site now has a *Print this story (free PDF)* button under it. One sheet, no account, nothing to install.
A link is no use in a waiting room. If the appointment is Thursday, what helps is a piece of paper in the bag on Wednesday night — and something you can hand to a grandparent, a childminder, or the teacher who asked what you've been reading. It prints on white with nothing around it: no navigation, no advert, no sign-up.
Teachers and therapists: these are free to print and free to photocopy for the families you work with. You don't need to ask.
Everyone in the story
You can now put up to four children in one story, and the builder says so.
The honest version is worse than that. You could always type in a second and third child, and the server was quietly using only the first one. Nobody was told. If you ever made a story for two siblings and wondered why only one of them turned up — that was us, and I'm sorry.
Making it again now will include all of them. If your shelf is full and you'd rather not delete something to do it, email me and I'll sort it out.
Hear the voice before you decide about it
Reading aloud is a paid feature, and until now nobody who hadn't paid had heard a second of it — so the only reason to upgrade was a sentence on a pricing page.
Every free account now gets one full story read aloud. Not a clip: the whole story, with the lullaby underneath, on whichever one you choose. Go and hear it. It's the part of this product I'm proudest of and it was hidden behind a paywall nobody could evaluate.
A full shelf is a choice now, not an error
The free shelf keeps three stories. When it fills up, you used to get a red error box — which is a terrible way to handle the most loaded moment in the whole product: a parent deciding which of their child's stories has to go.
It's now a choice, with both honest ways forward on it. Make room, or see what a bigger shelf costs. Nobody should be cornered by software at bedtime.
Deleting your account now deletes everything
Deleting your account is meant to remove every trace of your family. Two tables weren't on the list — including one holding a written description of what your child looks like — and one line in it had been quietly matching nothing at all since the day it was written.
Nobody's data was actually left behind; the accounts involved were all still live. The bug would have stranded the next person to leave. Both gaps are closed, the list now carries the query for checking it against the database so it can't silently drift again, and there's a clock on the anonymous usage log so nothing sits there indefinitely.
Our data-processing agreement with OpenAI is now recorded on the safety page and the privacy page, so what happens to a story after it's written is written down rather than implied.
Also fixed
Signing in with Google used to show you a long random database hostname on Google's own screen — technically correct, and it looked exactly like something you should close immediately. It says ztales.com now, because that's who you're signing in to. The button also no longer appears if you've arrived from inside another app's browser, where Google blocks sign-in outright; you'll get a note telling you to open the page properly instead.
New accounts run a silent check for automated sign-ups — invisible unless something looks like a machine.
The sign-in page used to promise we'd only email you about your account. Then I counted: over your first two weeks we also send a few short notes about getting the most out of it. The practice was fine, the promise wasn't, and a promise stricter than the behaviour is still a broken one. It now says what actually arrives, there's an unsubscribe link on every one, and the privacy page matches. No newsletter, no ads, and your address is never sold. That part was always true.
And: text-only stories no longer sit in a layout built for pictures, a story someone shares with you ends with a wind-down breath instead of stopping dead, and the 64 free story pages now link properly to each other and to the bedtime calculator — 34 of them previously had exactly one way in.
The point of all of it
Most of what's above exists because a bedtime is rarely just a bedtime. There's a thing happening on Thursday, or a baby arriving, or a bed that suddenly has to be slept in alone. Those nights are the ones where a story does actual work — not by making the thing go away, but by making it already familiar by the time it arrives.
So: pick what's actually happening and make tonight's story about it. It's free, it takes about thirty seconds, and there's no account needed to read all 35 of the ones I've already written.
As always, most of the above started as somebody's message. Tell me what would make bedtime better at ztales.com/feedback, and I'll build it.
— Damon
Damon Scaife builds Z Tales on his own — the story rules, the illustration prompts, the code and the safety guardrails. He answers hello@ztales.com himself. More about Z Tales.