There is a particular failure mode in bedtime stories, and almost everyone writes it the first time. The story builds nicely, something goes wrong, the problem gets solved — and then the last page announces what the whole thing meant. "And Luna learned that being brave means trying anyway."
It is a reasonable instinct. You want the story to be worth the twenty minutes. But that closing sentence does something specific to a child at bedtime: it wakes them up. A moral is addressed to the reader, not the character, and the moment you address the reader you have pulled them out of the world you spent nine pages building.
Settle the weather, not the plot
A calm ending is not the same as a resolved one. What settles a child is not knowing that the problem is fixed — it is feeling that the emotional temperature has come down. Those are different things, and the second one is what you are actually writing toward.
Watch what the good ones do. The character is somewhere safe. Something small and physical happens: a light goes off, a blanket is pulled up, a shadow turns out to be nothing much. The pace of the sentences slows. Often the very last image is quiet and slightly wide — the room, the window, the night outside — pulling back from the character rather than zooming in on their lesson.
End on an image, not a statement
The most reliable trick is to make your final page a picture rather than a conclusion. "Luna turned off the hallway light. A small moonbeam rested beside her bed." That sentence carries the whole meaning of the story — she does not need the light any more — without once saying so.
A child who is not ready to think about it just hears a nice picture and falls asleep. A child who is ready gets there on their own, which is the only way that kind of understanding ever actually lands.
Let the last sentence be short
Read your ending out loud. If the last sentence takes more than one breath, it is probably explaining something. Endings that work tend to be short, concrete, and a little bit open. They stop rather than conclude.
This is also why refrains work so well at bedtime. A phrase that has appeared three times already and comes back one last time on the final page does not need to explain itself. The repetition has done the work. The child knows what it means, and hearing it again is a small, satisfying click rather than a lecture.
What to cut
When an ending feels wrong, look for these three things and cut whichever you find. A sentence beginning "And so". A sentence containing the word "learned". A sentence that names the emotion the story has already shown you. Almost every over-explained ending is one of those three, and almost every one of them can simply be deleted, leaving the page before it as the real ending.