The surprising way a TonieBox can help if your children suffer with nightmares

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One of the first things we ever bought our son when we found out I was pregnant was a book - Each Peach, Pear Plum to be exact so books and reading were always going to be very present in our lives. I'm a huge book worm and recently found myself reaching for audiobooks more and more so the idea of a TonieBox came quite naturally for us. 

The TonieBox is a really cool way for children to listen to audiobooks - it works by placing audio figurines aka Tonies on top of the box where they'll then play the chosen audio. Children can then sit back and listen or have it in the background while they play. There's a huge variety of Tonies available including Paw Patrol, Thomas the Tank Engine and Disney. Thomas the Tank Engine has been a huge hit for our train-loving little boy.

The TonieBox also comes in a variety of colours making it a great and colourful addition to any book lover's home. 

The boxes are really fun and easy to use as they're designed to be used from as young as three years old, that's also why you'll notice the boxes are quite soft and durable too. To use the box, all you need to do is place a character on the top of the box, this will magnetically stay on where it'll begin to read-aloud stories and songs. When the character is taken off the box, the story will pause or stop completely if you don't place the character back on. 

As mentioned above, there are lots of characters to choose from and each one comes with its own playlist. We've added Frozen 2 and Chase from Paw Patrol to our collection in recent weeks but Thomas the Tank Engine is definitely getting the most use. You can order storage bags or boxes to keep your Tonies in which I think we'll do - it'll be much easier to store them that way.

Set up is super easy, you just need a Wifi connection and the app to start the initial start-up and then you can use it on the go as the battery lasts up to seven hours. When the LED light on the top of the TonieBox lights up orange it's time to charge so just place it back on its charging dock - so simply!

There were a few reasons why we wanted to introduce a TonieBox to our son but one of the main reasons was to make bedtime easier and create less fear around nighttime and monsters. It's only in recent months that he has had the odd bad dream and spoken of monsters and this felt like a great option to try and eliminate that fear. 

While researching the boxes, it was revealed from a study carried out by Tonies that the pandemic has had quite an impact on children's sleep with fears of monsters being the most common theme of nightmares. So imagine our delight when we discovered Tonies was releasing 'Only Monsters can Hear This' - a special downloadable audio that ‘shoos away’ mischievous bedtime beasts.

The new 'Only Monsters Can Hear This' downloadable content has been created to support parents of children who are scared and might be finding it difficult to drift off. It helps to show little ones that monsters are nothing to be afraid of and to help rebuild confidence at bedtime. The audio consists of a soothing introduction to ease children into a sleepy state before playing a sound that 'only monsters can hear'. 

The free content, which can be downloaded onto a Creative Tonie and aims to be part of a sleep routine which works for both child and parent. We've personally found it really helpful, it took some convincing but after about a week our eldest was starting to ask for it to be put on and touch wood, we've had no monster incidents since.

You can buy TonieBox for £69.95 and each of the Tonies are £14.99 although they do often have 4 for 3 offers and money off. They're available at most toy retailers too - they make great gifts, my parents bought some for our son for Easter recently. 

Overall, we're big fans. It's been really helpful during times when I've needed to feed or change our youngest as I've been able to sit our son down with the box so he can listen to a book. I'm really looking forward to seeing how much more we utilise it this year especially as our daughter gets older and becomes more interested in books too. 

Do you have a TonieBox? What are your favourite characters to play?