...because we care about who she's becoming

By Kimberly Inskeep

I had coffee recently with a thoughtful, accomplished friend; a mom of two beautiful, talented girls right in the Foxtale age range. She and her husband have spent their careers in film and television. They understand story. They’ve built their lives around it.  They believe in it.

So I expected alignment.  Instead, I left… deflated.

She said, kindly but directly, “Kimberly, I love what you’re doing with Foxtale. I really do. But you need to be on YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest. That’s where these kids are. Parents who think their kids aren’t on social media or watching YouTube are just blind. Whether we like it or not, they’re there. If not at home, then somewhere else.”

Then she said something I hadn’t heard before: “Kids feed on vertical content. They love it. They don’t really have the attention for story anymore. Not the way we did. Character development … plot … that kind of thing. It’s just not how they engage now.”

I drove home in silence. Is she right?

If she’s right about story, then something far bigger than reading is at stake.

Because the art of becoming begins with understanding story.

And if she loses her ability to follow a story, she may never fully understand her own.

This is not a question about books versus screens. It’s not old versus new. It’s not preference. It’s about her formation. What is shaping her inner life?  Is she learning to think, or just react? Is she developing depth or just consumption?  The question is not whether she quickly scrolls. The question is whether she ever learns to go deep.

C.S. Lewis once wrote that in reading, we “become a thousand men and yet remain ourselves.” He believed that reading frees us from what he called “the prison of the self.”  Through story, we enter lives not our own. We feel what others feel. We see what others see. We expand. We learn empathy. We learn to feel deeply. 

And for our girls, this is not a luxury. It is formation.  When a girl reads, she is not just deciphering words on a page.  She is trying on identities … practicing empathy … exploring courage, friendship, fear, and belonging.

She is … imagining who she might become. 

What Lewis believed, science now confirms. Cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf explains that the reading brain is not something we are born with. It is built … carefully, over time. And childhood is the most important window for building it.

In Proust and the Squid, Wolf shows how learning to read develops neural pathways that enable deep thinking, connection, inference, reflection. In Reader, Come Home, her tone shifts and we feel her sense of urgency, and even grief; because the very kind of reading that builds these pathways is being displaced.

When children spend most of their time in fast, fragmented digital environments, their brains begin to adapt accordingly. They become faster at skimming, quicker at switching, and more responsive to stimulation.  And they become less practiced in sustained attention, deep comprehension, empathy, and critical thinking.

If deep reading isn’t built early, deep becoming gets harder to build later.

One builds a mind. The other trains a reflex. And that reflex asks for more.

What my friend called “vertical content” is not inherently bad. But it does train the brain in a very specific way.  Vertical content has become the powerful delivery system for the age compression shaping our young girls.

As I drove home that day, I was deeply sad.  And then something settled in me.  Because I don’t actually believe we are powerless here.  Yes, our daughters encounter screens. Yes, they will see content we didn’t choose. Yes, we cannot control everything. And yes, we especially want them to belong. 

But that does not mean we surrender her formation … who she’s becoming.

We know something very important about this age: Confidence begins to dip around eight. Identity is forming. Friendships are deepening. Belonging starts to matter in new ways.  And in this exact window, the question “Who am I?” takes root.

If social media teaches her how she is seen, stories teach her who she is.

That belief is why stories sit at the center of everything Foxtale does. Stories shape identity more than trends do. So, our whole brand ethos is built around story. Not to compete with screens but to give her something deeper to stand on. Because if she has a strong inner story, she is far less likely to be swept away by someone else’s.

A few small shifts can make a meaningful difference. Protect a small, daily rhythm of reading.  Even 20 minutes matters. Consistency builds capacity. And read with her, not as an assignment, but as a shared experience. 

When our daughter was young, Sundays were our family reading days. Either in the morning after a yummy breakfast or in the summer evenings over a picnic dinner. We read Chronicles of Narnia, The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, A Wrinkle in Time, and more. We didn’t rush. We talked about characters as if they were real because in the ways that mattered, they were.  Those days didn’t just build a reader; they built a shared inner world that we could return to together.

Let her choose stories that pull her in. Engagement matters more than the title. And talk about the story. Not for comprehension but for connection. Ask her what she noticed, how a character felt, what she would have done. These questions do something quiet and lasting — they teach her that her inner life is worth paying attention to.

This is not a debate about books versus screens. It is a choice between depth or drift, formation or influence, a rich inner life or anxiety-producing external noise. We can live in the reality that exists – one where technology is part of daily life – while challenging the status quo in subtle but significant ways.

We don’t have to win every battle.  But we do have to give her a place where her mind can grow deep roots.  Because if she never learns to enter a story, she may spend her life trying to live inside someone else’s version of one.

Why take this on?  Because we know you care about who she’s becoming.

So maybe tonight, instead of asking how her day went, you ask something different:

“What story are you in right now?”

“How is it the same of different than yours?”