We built Tales by Tuck around what researchers have found about reading aloud, personalisation, and a gentle daily rhythm. Here’s some of the evidence that shaped it.
When researchers scanned the brains of three to five year-olds listening to stories, children with a richer reading environment at home showed stronger activity in the areas behind mental imagery and understanding a narrative, the very skills that underpin learning to read.
Hutton et al., Pediatrics (2015).
In studies of personalised books, children smiled and laughed more, talked more, and stayed more engaged than they did even with their own favourite non-personalised book. Personalisation has also been linked to better word learning and to kinder, more prosocial behaviour.
Kucirkova, Messer & Whitelock, Journal of Early Childhood Literacy (2013); Kucirkova et al. (2014); Early Childhood Education Journal (2020).
A consistent story routine is linked not only to better sleep, but to emotional and behavioural development, early literacy, warmer parent-child time and calmer parents, with benefits showing within just a few days. And because you choose when each story arrives, that rhythm can sit wherever it suits your family: the bath, the school run, the long drive home, or bedtime.
Mindell & Williamson, Sleep Medicine Reviews (2018).
In a classic experiment, people who wove a list of words into a little story later recalled around 93% of them, against just 13% for those who simply tried to memorise. Facts carried inside a narrative stay with us. So when you ask for a tale set among the Romans, or deep in the rainforest, what they’re learning at school slips in through the story, and sticks.
Bower & Clark, Psychonomic Science (1969).
Children who are read to every day hear around 1.4 million more words by the time they start school than children who aren’t. And the language in stories is richer than everyday chatter, full of words a normal conversation rarely reaches.
Logan, Justice et al., 2019 (Ohio State University), reported by the World Economic Forum.
A note on the research: these studies look at shared reading, personalised books and story routines in general, across many children. We share them because they shaped how we built Tales by Tuck, not as promises about any one child. Every family, and every little one, is different.
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