Does telling children fairytales make them irrational?

I loved the pressed fairies! I bought it as a birthday present for my BiL because I thought he would too - but it upset him! Which made me laugh even more.

Lilygran Mon 09-Jun-14 11:08:11
And another view .....
Thank you very much indeed for this link, Lily G. A rich vein of information leading me into all manner of capillaries.
I'd be interested to know what conclusions or new thoughts these sources opened for you?
Regards

I'm not keen on fairy stories containing beautiful, helpless princesses rescued by handsome, brave princes, etc., etc., but on balance I don't see that much of an issue with them.

Many books written for children are irrational in the sense of not being based in reality - the tiger who came to tea; imaginary monsters (including the one that ate Bernard up and - unnoticed by his parents - replaced him); the duckling who was upset about being called ugly, etc. etc. In my experience, children love these books and want to read them over and over again. As long as their reading matter is mixed and also contains stories that reflect reality, I think it's OK for them to read fairy stories. Also, along with allowing children to experience imaginary worlds (and, goodness knows, with some of the difficulties children face these days it may be nice for them to "escape" for a while), some of these stories have quite valuable messages.

REPORTED

Well I have fairies in my garden. They have doors to their houses, a swing and a small pond with a bench where there are rabbits hopping around.
All 3 DGSs have loved them as have many neighbouring children and friends.
Oh dear , I hope I have not harmed their mental health.

ginny

Well I have fairies in my garden. They have doors to their houses, a swing and a small pond with a bench where there are rabbits hopping around.
All 3 DGSs have loved them as have many neighbouring children and friends.
Oh dear , I hope I have not harmed their mental health.

I doubt it, Ginny , but you may well have harmed mine.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣.
You should take more water with it..😊😊😊

durhamjen

The Water Babies was written in 1862. Not that new.

I cried buckets after finishing The Water Babies - I was no more than 9. My father wondered what on earth had upset me!

'If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales.
If you want them to be more intelligent,
read more fairy tales'
🧚‍♂️ 🧚‍♀️ Albert Einstein 🧚‍♀️ 🧚‍♀️

I have never forgotten the moment the boy, covered in soot from the chimney, found himself in a snow white bedroom in The Water Babies. I read it a few years ago and still found it magical.
Imagination is so important and to me, the real world is still a magical, fairylike place.

I just liked stories. It didn't matter what they were about. I don't/didn't see 'fairy stories' as inherently better or worse than any other type of story.

IMO, the more types of story a child is exposed to the better.

Elegran

Or does it help them learn that some stories are not true and could not possible be true, but are just tales to be enjoyed? I'd say that most fairy tales are subtle lessons in life.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-27715735

When Mrs Trump read her little boy his bed time story she forgot to explain fairytales cannot possibly be real and won't come true. The poor little chap still doesn't know.

Poor Richard Dawkins! How sad to have so little imagination.

I still love fairytales, or perhaps we should call them folk tales.
I think I always understood they were fantasy, and I never identified with the princesses. Many contain lessons for life, and reflect universal concerns, which is why some of them exist in several different cultures.

My childhood would have been pretty dull if I had never had fairy stories read to me, or read them myself... as someone else said, we have told each other stories, true or not, since time out of mind.

They make life far more interesting than it really is...

We make sense of the world through stories, whether those are books, films, whatever.

Where do fairy stories end and fantasy begin? Anthropromorphic animals, cartoon characters, living dolls, borrowers and all of the many unreal characters that populate children's books, none of these are real.

When I was a child, we stayed in a B&B where the owner had acollection of real original, mainly German and Scandinavian 'fairy' and folklore books. These stories were most emphatically not stories for children. The fairystories children get are comprehensively watered down and bowdlerised.

The original stories, as I read them in my holiday bedroom, were frightening, cruel and violent. I was 13 and, when we lived in Malaya as a 10 year old. I had read unedited descriptions of what happened to British soldiers in Japanese prisoner of war camps. These fairy stories gave me nightmares the way the stories of horrors in pow camps never did.

Yes, I’ve read some of the original stories and they are horrific. I daren’t think about them.

AAAHappyMan

*BeeWitch*, very many thanks for your mention of Lady Chatterley's ''Pressed Fairy'' book, variously categorized as : Speculative fiction or Paranormal.
I live very close to the home of the Cottingley Fairies - the inspiration and guiding glimmer for this tome. The fairies' bower and sanctuary is a site much celebrated and venerated by the locals as befits such an asset in this area of derelict and fire-torn mills, but a cobble's throw from Bronte-Land.
Well sculptured and manicured paths, much frequented by residents and their defecating dogs, lead one to the various immaculately maintained and tended settings featured in the 1997 films FairyTale: A True Story and Photographing Fairies. Discrete, defaced placards tell the tale of how Conan Doyle's famous detective, Mr Cumberbund, reputedly discovered the flaws faulting the photographs, and how 'Magician' James Randi overthrew that cynical analysis as recently as 1978.
Replete with government grants, and generous donations from the public visiting Fairy-Holme, it is rumoured that the National Media Museum in the nearby City of Bradford [Woolopolis] is to build a new fairy-ring-wing dedicated to traditions verified by such manifestations as these. Joe Cooper(+), a much loved local banjo-playing sociologist and astrologer, has agreed to appear in ectoplazmic form to declare the wing open.
I too must fly, I have star-dust to sprinkle and broomsticks to fettle.

(+) = Cooper, Joe, 1982. “Cottingley: At Last the Truth.”
^The Unexplained 117: 2238–2340.^

I can see this is a very ancient thread revived 11 years later😁 but the above post is very funny.

Fairy stories were ever thus. They are part of a genre of oral history that was passed down at the hearth since the days of hunter gatherers. They connect us to good, evil, ancestors, natures and are didactic in their nature. They are actually an inherent part of the human psyche. If we take away fairy tales from children, we are even more depriving them of belonging, identifying, and feeling protected by the tribe. I always think of the book 'Where the Wild Things Are', by Maurice Sendak. He pretty much captured the essence of how a child experiences fear in the safety of their own home with their own family and the little boy conquers the monsters and feels himself to be a hero. Should we take this away from our children? I am old school on this one.

Many of the original stories, especially those by the Brothers Grimm, are rather scary and macabre - likely because they were not originally written for children in the first place!

The Grimms wanted to preserve German folk tales. They spent some time going around Germany and collecting folk tales from various people they met. Finally, they sat down to collate the stories - not an easy job, especially because often there were multiple versions of the same tale. They would find ways to combine these versions to craft a single narrative. Although their first work was titled "Children and Household Tales", they intended these stories not so much for children but for scholars, similar to themselves.

When you start looking into the history behind different fairy tales - earlier versions, their origins, why they were likely created in the first place - it's absolutely fascinating. One theory is that some of the "monsters" in fairy tales may have been based on real people, individuals who committed acts so monstrous that they were thought to have been something non-human. Fairy tales also often impart moral lessons or reveal important truths.

M0nica

Where do fairy stories end and fantasy begin? Anthropromorphic animals, cartoon characters, living dolls, borrowers and all of the many unreal characters that populate children's books, none of these are real.

When I was a child, we stayed in a B&B where the owner had acollection of real original, mainly German and Scandinavian 'fairy' and folklore books. These stories were most emphatically not stories for children. The fairystories children get are comprehensively watered down and bowdlerised.

The original stories, as I read them in my holiday bedroom, were frightening, cruel and violent. I was 13 and, when we lived in Malaya as a 10 year old. I had read unedited descriptions of what happened to British soldiers in Japanese prisoner of war camps. These fairy stories gave me nightmares the way the stories of horrors in pow camps never did.

Interesting to read your post. We need to ask the children what they like best. There are many very good children's writers like Michael Rosen and Jacqueline Wilson who may not deal with pure fairy but do explore sympathetically a modern childhood. And more will follow in future. The Harry Potter stories seemed to be a hit with a generation of children with all the magic and as long as the children are the heroes and winners, I think all of these stories will be a success. However, the fairy stories you speak of, some by the Brothers Grimm, were of their age. They were didactic in their nature in a very tight and strict Lutheran kind of way installing fear and teaching both adults and children that if you erred from the path of righteousness, you would get into serious trouble. Thank goodness they were watered down for modern children to enjoy. Some of the most wonderful fairy stories were handed down by the Victorians, by people like Andrew Lang with his colour fairy books, E. Nesbit, and during the 20th century by C.S. Lewis, Tolkien etc.

I never read the bad, cruel bits in Fairy Tales, too scary for me never mind children.Let children have the magic of make believe as long as they can. I still miss grim bits in books and tv
switch over channels when pictures of emaciated bodies from war zones appear on tv. Have left cinema mid film if a was really bad, it must be some sort of phobia, others seem to cope, so know its me. I want godmothers and fairies.

The earliest 'fairy' stories were not written children, they were written for adults. The brothers Grimm published a scholarly collection of folk tales, which only became popular when they made them more anodyne and rewrote them for children.

The original tales were far more violent and they even wrote a less violent version for adults.

Most f these stories record the old folk tales, past verbally from one generation to the next. They were one of many such writers collecting these stories, much as Percy Grainger collected folk songs.

As I said when I had a holiday bedroom containing a library of these books with the tales in their original form, they gave me nightmares.

I loved fairy tales as a child and now love reading fantasy novels and watching fantasy films. Being taken to a different world is so enriching.
And no, I’m very rational but have an over-active imagination!

ginny

Well I have fairies in my garden. They have doors to their houses, a swing and a small pond with a bench where there are rabbits hopping around.
All 3 DGSs have loved them as have many neighbouring children and friends.
Oh dear , I hope I have not harmed their mental health.

How lovely. I had them too and my family loved them.
Of course they were real.

We are advised to read to them I’m in 3/4 year old rooms so it can be daunting reading little red riding hood!