How My Kids Stopped Asking for Screens — And Started Asking for the Next Adventure

Thank you to House of Heroes for sponsoring this post.

If you are anything like me, you have tried every trick in the book to make screen time feel less like the default setting of your evenings. Activity kits that lose their novelty by Thursday. Board games that work brilliantly for two sessions and then somehow disappear into a cupboard. Apps that promise learning and deliver distraction.

What I had not tried — and what genuinely surprised me — was something so old-fashioned it felt almost radical: a parent reading a story aloud while their child makes every single decision about what happens next.

That is the entire premise of House of Heroes, a guided family storytelling adventure platform for children aged 4 to 11. And it is the first activity in a very long time that has made my child ask — unprompted, before I suggested anything — whether we could do it again tonight.

How it actually works.

Every adventure in House of Heroes is written word for word. Parents read aloud. Children decide what happens. There are no rules to learn, no dice to roll, no creative writing required from the parent. You open the adventure, read the first line, and ask your child what they want to do. Everything else follows from there.

The stories take place in a magical world called Eternia, where your child attends a school called the House of Heroes alongside a cast of characters that grows richer with every adventure — a pug wizard headmaster, a half-human half-owl roommate, a strict but warm guardian teacher, and a seamster who makes every student their own magical cloak. Your child is always the Hero. Always themselves. Every choice they make shapes what happens next.

Each adventure takes 20 to 25 minutes. Which makes it the perfect length for a weeknight — long enough to feel like a genuine event, short enough to actually finish before bedtime.

What makes it genuinely different.

The thing that struck me most was how naturally it builds real skills without ever announcing that it is doing so. Every adventure practises something specific — courage in the face of the unknown, kindness when it costs something, persistence through difficulty.

There is even a series of short visits from a dwarf character called Master Tolm, who drops by between adventures specifically to talk about values like grit and kindness in ways that feel like a real conversation rather than a lesson.

But more than any specific skill, what House of Heroes practises most is the parent-child relationship itself. Twenty minutes of being fully present, reading a story together, watching your child’s face when they make a decision that turns out to matter — it is the kind of connection that does not happen by accident. It happens because something made it easy enough to actually do.

There is also no screen involved.

Which, if you have ever tried to pry a device from a child’s hands at bedtime, it’s not nothing.

Where to start

The first adventure is completely free. Your child helps a small pug wizard escape from three very angry cats, discovers the new magical world, and arrives at the gates of the House of Heroes for the first time. It takes about fifteen minutes and requires nothing from you except a voice and a willingness to say yes to whatever your child suggests.

Download the first adventure free here — and see what your evenings look like when the story belongs to your child.

House of Heroes is a monthly subscription platform delivering new guided family adventures every week. Learn more at houseofheroes.co.

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