The Stories I Cry Every Time I Make

I need to tell you about the part of Enchantably that makes me cry.

Not the happy cry. Not the “my kid pointed at the page and said that’s my bear” cry. The other kind. The kind where you’re generating a storybook at your kitchen table at 11pm and your throat closes because the story you’re building is about your child getting lost in a grocery store and you have to stop and breathe for a minute before you can look at the illustrations.

That’s Safety Magic. And it’s the most important thing I’ve ever made.

What Safety Magic is

Safety Magic is a collection of personalized story arcs on Enchantably designed to teach children critical safety rules — what to do if there’s a fire, how to stay safe near water, what to do if they get separated from you in public, how to handle a stranger situation, road safety, being home alone.

Each story is fully customizable. Your child’s name. Their sibling or best friend. Your actual phone number, built into the story so they memorize it inside an adventure instead of from a flashcard. Your family’s specific rules — not generic ones, yours — woven into the narrative so naturally that a child absorbs them the way they absorb any story: by living inside it.

And then there’s the song.

Each Safety Magic story generates a custom song — powered by Lyria, Google’s AI music model — that turns the safety rules into something singable. A melody your child can carry in their head. A chorus that comes back to them not because they studied it, but because it’s catchy and they can’t stop humming it.

My boys hum theirs around the house. In the car. In the bath. They don’t know they’re rehearsing what to do in an emergency. They think they’re singing a song from one of their new books.

That’s the whole idea.

Why this is the hardest thing I build

I want to be honest about something: I have enormous resistance to making these stories. Every single time.

When I sit down to build a Safety Magic arc, I have to put my children — by name, in illustrations that look like them — into dangerous situations. I have to write a scenario where my kid is lost. Where there’s a fire. Where someone they don’t know approaches them. I have to look at an AI-generated illustration of my son standing alone in a crowd, scanning for a face he can’t find, and I have to keep going.

I tear up every time. I’m tearing up writing this.

The instinct is to stop. To close the laptop. To think about something easier — a Quick Magic story about space or dinosaurs or a trip to Tooth Town. Or even better — space dinosaurs’ journey through Tooth Town. Something that doesn’t require me to imagine my child in danger. Something that lets me keep pretending the world is only made of bedtime stories and construction-paper hearts.

But here’s what I’ve come to understand, and it’s the thing that keeps me building these even when every part of me wants to look away:

The resistance is not a reason to stop. It’s exactly the reason to keep going.

Because if I — someone who thinks about children’s safety constantly, who builds safety tools for a living, who has resources and motivation to prepare her kids — if even I want to avoid this conversation, then most parents are avoiding it too. And their kids are walking around without the language, without the rehearsal, without the song stuck in their head that tells them what to do when something goes wrong.

That’s not okay. That’s the gap Safety Magic is built to close.

The problem with how we teach safety now

Think about how most kids learn safety rules. A parent sits them down and says: “If you ever get lost, find a mom with kids and tell her you need help.” Or: “If there’s a fire, get low and crawl to the door.” Or: “Never go with someone you don’t know, even if they say Mommy sent them.”

The parent says it clearly. The child nods. Everyone feels better.

But here’s the thing: a 5-year-old who nods when you explain fire safety in the kitchen on a Tuesday afternoon is not the same child as a 5-year-old who wakes up at 2am to the sound of a smoke alarm. The calm, rational child who understood the instructions is gone. In their place is a terrified kid running on adrenaline and instinct, and whatever they do next will come from the deepest, most practiced part of their memory — not the part that stores a one-time conversation, but the part that stores things they’ve lived a hundred times.

Stories build that kind of memory. They’re not information — they’re rehearsal. A child who has read a story where they navigated a fire, where they crawled to the door, where they remembered the rule and it worked — that child has a felt experience to draw on. Not a lecture. An experience. One they’ve visited over and over at bedtime, in a safe place, with a parent beside them.

And a song? A song lives in the body. You don’t have to think about the words to a song you know — they’re just there, the way your phone number is just there. That’s why the Lyria-generated safety songs matter. When a child is scared and their thinking brain goes offline, the song is still playing. The rules are still accessible. Not because they memorized them, but because they sang them, over and over, until the words became automatic.

Why the toy or pet option exists

I wrote about this in a previous post about empathy, but it bears repeating here because it matters so much for safety stories specifically.

Some kids are ready to be the hero of a scary scenario. They want to see themselves navigating danger. It makes them feel powerful and prepared. My 6-year-old is like this — he wants to be the one who saves the day, and reading about himself doing it makes him stand a little taller.

My 5-year-old is different. He feels everything deeply. If I put him at the center of a story about getting lost, the fear would overwhelm the lesson. He wouldn’t learn what to do — he’d just be scared.

So Safety Magic gives you a choice. Your child can be the hero. Or their favorite toy — their stuffed elephant, their bear, their dinosaur — can go through the safety scenario instead. The rules are identical. The information is the same. But the child gets to learn from one step back, watching their beloved companion navigate the situation rather than imagining themselves in it.

It’s emotional distance by design. The research on empathy development supports this approach — children can absorb lessons from characters they care about without being overwhelmed, especially when the subject matter is frightening. The toy carries the fear so the child can carry the lesson.

Both options lead to the same place: a kid who knows what to do. They just get there by different doors.

What’s in Safety Magic right now

Here’s what’s currently available, with more arcs in development:

Fire safety. What to do when the smoke alarm sounds. Get low. Crawl to the door. Feel the handle. Find the meeting spot outside. Your family’s actual meeting spot, built into the story.

Water safety. Rules for pools, lakes, beaches. When to swim, when to wait for an adult, what to do if someone else is in trouble. The rules are specific to the type of water your family is around most.

Lost in public. What to do if you get separated from your parent at a store, a park, a crowded place. Who to approach for help. How to remember your parent’s phone number (because it’s in the song, and they’ve been singing it for weeks).

Stranger safety. The hardest one to build. The one I resist the most. How to recognize when something feels wrong. The difference between a trusted adult and a stranger who says they know your parents. What to do, who to tell, how to leave.

Road safety. Crossing streets, parking lots, driveways. The moments that are routine for adults and invisible to kids until something goes wrong.

Home alone safety. For the slightly older kids. What to do if you’re home and someone knocks. The rules your family has, made specific and singable.

Bully safety. For teaching kindness and how to stand up to bullying. Another heartbreaker.

Body autonomy. This one hits hard, as I struggle between forcing my kids to eat broccoli and try something new (like a rollercoaster) and trusting their feelings.

I won’t pretend these are perfect yet. I’m still refining the arcs, still testing the emotional pacing, still watching my kids’ faces as I read them to see where the story loses them or lands too hard. Some of the illustrations need another generation pass. Some of the songs need a lyric tweak.

But they’re live. They’re available. And the core of each one — the safety rules, the rehearsal, the song — is solid. They’ll keep getting better. That’s the commitment.

The book they don’t ask for (but can’t stop thinking about)

I want to end with honesty, because I’ve been honest about everything else and I’m not going to start polishing now.

Safety Magic books are not my kids’ favorite books.

They’re not the ones they grab off the shelf at bedtime. They’re not the ones that get the “again! again!” They don’t compete with Tooth Town or the space adventures or the stories where their stuffed bear rides a dragon. Those are the books my kids love. Safety Magic books are the books my kids think about.

There’s a difference, and I think it’s more important.

When we read a Safety Magic story, the room gets quieter. They see themselves in the illustrations — their names, their house, their world — and it makes them uncomfortable. Not scared, exactly. More like... alert. The way you feel when someone tells you something that matters and you’re not sure what to do with it yet.

And then the questions start.

“What if we’re on the second story and there’s a fire?”

“What if I can’t find you and there’s no mom with kids around?”

“What if the smoke alarm goes off but it’s just burned toast? Do we still leave?”

These questions are the whole point. They’re a child doing something extraordinary — they’re taking a scenario they’ve never been in and thinking it through in advance. They’re stress-testing the rules. They’re finding the gaps. They’re doing, at 5 and 6 years old, what emergency planners do for a living: they’re running drills in their heads.

I don’t have answers to all of their questions. The second-story fire question stumped me — we hadn’t planned for that, and we needed to. So we talked about it. We walked upstairs together and looked at the windows and figured out a plan. That conversation would never have happened without the book. Not because I’m a negligent parent, but because I hadn’t thought of it either. My 6-year-old thought of it. Because a story put him in the scenario and his brain did what brains do — it looked for the edge cases.

And the songs — the Lyria-generated safety songs — those live somewhere different than the stories. My boys hum them. In the car. In the bath. Not with the same joy as their other favorite songs. More absently. More like the way you hum something that’s just lodged in your head. They don’t know they’re rehearsing what to do in an emergency. The melody has just become part of their background noise, carrying the rules with it.

That’s Safety Magic. Not a favorite book. Something quieter and more important than that. A book that makes kids a little uncomfortable, a lot more thoughtful, and — in the moment it matters most — a little more prepared.

I cry every time I make one. And I’m going to keep making them until every parent who wants this for their kid can have it.