Bedtime History: Inspirational Stories for Kids and Families

Stories sometimes include people of diverse backgrounds and cultures like a telling of Siddhartha Gautama Buddha and Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. More diverse episodes can feel few and far between. Missteps take place, particularly in earlier seasons, such as Breck repeating that European explorers "discovered the Americas" which ignores the Indigenous people already living there. In another episode, Breck observes that "when [Lewis and Clark] met Sacajawea and her husband, they knew they would be a perfect fit" -- which feels like an oversimplification of kidnapping and trafficking. But the cultural sensitivity does improve in later seasons.

Breck tells suspenseful stories, such as the 2018 incident where a young soccer team was trapped in a cave in Thailand, running out of oxygen and given sedatives before being rescued weeks later.

Parents need to know that Bedtime History: Inspirational Stories for Kids and Families covers broad topics, sometimes oversimplifying events. There are suspenseful stories, including that of the soccer team trapped in the Tham Luang caves in Thailand. Cultural blunders occasionally occur, such as an attempt to describe Día de los Muertos from an anthropological standpoint, and where the introduction of the story involves podcast creator Breck LeSueur reading the lyrics to a song from the Disney movie Coco. Effort and warmth can be heard in the narrator's voice, but the podcast's broad generalizations don't always hit the mark and may need further explanation from caregivers.