Once upon a time, our children loved stories. Every night, mothers and fathers would grab their children’s favorite books, snuggle up in their beds, and read. Do you remember?... I do.
We would explore lands never seen before, share timeless tales, and our young minds were filled with curiosity and… wonder. Wonder which began as a seed, and grew, and grew, leading us to become doctors, adventurers, pilots, entrepreneurs, and everything our society needed to flourish.
However, over the last two decades, this cornerstone tradition has been dying. In 2012, 64% of parents claimed to read to their children. In 2025, 41% of parents said they still do - less than half of parents.
We are losing our wonder…
I myself, a father of two young boys, found myself falling into the trap of letting my kids watch short, attention-grabbing videos before bed. I didn’t realize what I was doing until my wife, a teacher, pulled me aside and told me that I was robbing our children of something so valuable that I could be causing them to miss out on something I had… something that could alter their future if they did not have it. My eyes were opened.
However, the cat was out of the bag. My kids only wanted these videos. The books on my shelf—hundreds of them, which we had spent a small fortune on—sat there and couldn’t compete. I needed something to grab my kids and pull them back into stories that could help them learn how to be better humans, how to count, read, and most importantly... dream.
For months, I struggled—until I came upon an AI music generator. I started using it for fun myself, and then my kids requested that I make songs about our cats, themselves, and things they loved. They chose these songs over their longtime movie favorites. I wondered… and a light bulb went off in my head.
And so—I created Upona, an AI children’s book generator. I created stories featuring my kids going on adventures, their cats doing silly things, in many different styles, and then trained the AI to instill values that I wanted my kids to learn into these stories. And it worked… Now we read at least half a dozen books at night—if not more.
I made Upona originally for me, to solve my problem. But now I’m opening it to the world. Perhaps, together, we can teach the next generation to dream and… to restore their wonder.
– Michael