I've been split on this. On the one hand it is a bit unpleasant and can be traumatizing, and we tend to shy away from unpleasant things, but on the other hand lots of generations grew up on Grimm's Fairy Tales and Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales and learned a bit about how difficult life can be and the consequences of moral failings or lack of hard work. It is important to prepare children for the fact that life is not all rainbows and unicorns, but still important to protect them from the depravity of the world so that childhood is pleasant and magical with healthy emotional development. I guess there is a right way to do it, and a wrong way to do it, and that's part of the complexity of life/the universe/everything.
> learned a bit about how difficult life can be and the consequences of moral failings or lack of hard work
I don't remember anything about consequences of moral failings in the old fairy tales, just random violence and chaos. In Sleeping Beauty the prince's mother turns out to be an ogre who tries to eat Beauty's children, but luckily the prince returns in time and kills her. Where's the moral lesson there? Don't move in with your mother-in-law?
--Cinderella: mean deceptive people might get their feat chopped off & eyes pecked out. (In short, Karma. though unfortunately the world doesn't quite work that way, but there's still a bit of "the world can be ugly" too)
--Cat & The Mouse: Never forget that the nature of a predator is predation
--Hansel & Gretel: Don't take candy from strangers. Also, if something looks to good to be true, it probably is. And also that maybe little children are delicious? I mean, the witch had to have her reasons.
--Rumpelstiltskin: Okay, there's some mixed messages here. Lying father, malicious greedy king, deceptive girl... Rumpelstiltskin comes out looking like a hero, saving the girl's life 3 times but then get's cheated out of his last payment & kills himself. But he also wanted her baby. She agreed, but still... anyway no one really comes off smelling of roses but Rumpelstiltskin is the only one dead.
--The Peasant in Heaven: Truly good rich people are very rare
--Snow White: Alright, maybe this one shouldn't on the list. Could be there's a lesson about jealousy in there, and also that maybe you should try the Heimlich maneuver on someone that keels over while eating, but in the end it kind of boils down to some fairly creepy borderline necrophilia.
The same thing most poor kids learn growing up: Just because someone looks and speaks nicely or is nice to you doesn't tell you anything meaningful about them. And it can be a fatal mistake to not be careful.
The old stories were designed to help prepare children for the hostile world they lived in.
I forget who said it, but one theory I've heard is that kids are naturally afraid of their parents and haven't built the ability to hold opposing views at the same time, so they have trouble reconciling these loving god-like figures they depend on 100% for survival and the total fear they have when the same figures are angry or disappointed in them.
Stories like Sleeping Beauty or ones with monsters allow kids to transfer those feelings of all encompassing fear to these bad guys, until they outgrow it and they're able to handle ambiguity.
That doesn't explain why the stories were originally told, but could explain their stickiness.
> the total fear they have when the same figures are angry or disappointed in them
Hmm. This sounds like a hypothesis from someone who doesn't remember being a child very well. I never lived in total fear of my parents' anger or disappointment, and I'm pretty sure my kids never did either
IIRC, many of the most popular fairy tales give happy endings by pure luck and happenstance. Catch a fish with a magic ring, etc…. The ones with moral lessons are too on-the-nose to be enjoyable.
The most popular fairy tales also have been modified to be more kid friendly. Nobody saved Little Red Riding Hood. Sleeping Beauty wasn't kissed, she was raped in her sleep and gave birth; it was her child sucking the needle out of her finger that woke her up.
These used to be more than just stories for kids, but modern fairy tales are rarely ever told to an adult audience anymore. For many fairy tales, the happy ending was added centuries after they spread.
Try looking on youtube for a version of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" that ends with the boy being properly eaten. They've all been changed to have narrow-escape happy endings, wholly destroying the point of the narrative.
I think the popular mistake is to assume that every story in folklore collection must be for children and we must be able to derive some moral message out of it. This was time before TV and youtube. Adults told each other stories meant for adults and kids might or might not listen.
Folktales around the world are only partly to be enjoyed, being also thrilling, emotionally-stirring (and thus more memorable) stories to help people of all ages make healthier decisions.
I don't mind scary stories for children, especially when told by people who know those kids and can easily judge the effect. But, the generations growing up on that and them taking deep moral lessons from it point is overstated.
They were collected or written and then popular collections of folklore in some part of last century. They are not exactly bible, many of those stories don't even have some kind of moral lesson in them.
This is something I wish was brought up more. It is almost a meme that “the originals were darker,” but really the famous tales of the Grimms and Perrault et al are just local snapshots of a living tradition of the common people telling stories. I suppose the focus on the older recorded versions is a reaction against Disney and modified versions of stories marketed to children (e.g. Lang perhaps). And to be clear, I think all these, including Disney, are important culturally and present fine variants of the stories. Still, I don’t want us to forget the others.
Digging a little deeper, you find tons of variants of stories, and discover all sorts of new ones, hybrids, seemingly incomplete ones, different levels of embellishment, darker and lighter. And some do have morals, but a lot of them are just things happening. Some motifs just seem to stick. And folk tales were not primarily meant for children either—we tell kids campfire ghost stories all the time, and don’t think so much on what they teach. We just like them.
I feel like part of the problem is the medium. I read a lot of books as a kid. And there were many stories that I had no problem reading, but I really struggled watching on screen, even if I already knew what happened. Lord of the Rings being an example that comes to mind.
Because you can go decades without any kind of serious events in your life, living in a perfect bubble until shit hits the fan. That's when you learn nothing prepared you for that and no one cares or knows how to behave.
That's kind of the main reason we started to write stuff down, to learn things from the past through other's experiences, so that you don't have to feel alone going through every traumatising events as if you were the first human to do so.
We have empathy, better use it than wait for the hardest part of life to "give us a lesson", most of the really hard parts only happen once so you won't learn much, but you'll suffer a lot.
The hardest part about being involved in a life altering event/catastrophe is that even having the preperation you're often blindsided by someone's or some groups avarice.
My father who was financially devastated by people close to him passed on one insanely strong piece of advice that is superior to any fairy tale and saved me.
1. Always have a legal agreement at the start even/especially if it's friends and family.
2. Always have that legal agreement reviewed by your own attorney.
Years later I'm finally getting over the sudden violence and the hostility, but the law made sure their plans to intimidate, force, steal and defraud came to nothing.
I operate on the assumption that any sort of loan could end up as a "gift". If I'm going to loan friends or family money I ask myself if I'm OK not getting it back.
Don't lend more than you can claw back in small claims court. And have a written agreement. The small claims court size limits the potential downside, and the written agreement is proof of intent enough to stand up in small claims, so long as it's SMART (just like goals: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time bound).
That seems to be a key reason for fairy tales and such things— gentle preparation for life. It’s better to be equipped before battle rather than being tossed into the fray wholly unawares.
Imo, key reason for fairy tales is that both adults and children want to have fun. I watch movies and read books to have fun. Some of what my kids watch is written with proper moral lessons in it, but plenty of it is pure fun or with anti-lessons.
The people in the past had no youtube and no tv. They still wanted to have some fun.
Over lifetimes this works, sure. Any animal capable of passing on information to offspring likely does so, because it confers a boost in survival chance. For examples: sea turtles lay a bunch of eggs and leave, while a wolf family raises a much smaller number of pups.
Eventually. Other commenters have made note that you can coast for decades without encountering any though, so best be somewhat prepared by reading and listening to others.
I don't follow. Human history until recently was sustained largely by oral tradition and story telling; superseded by written story telling. What's the problem with telling stories that confer some wisdom or some sense of history or for fun?
Many of these stories are embedded idiomatically in many languages? Let each parent decide at what age they should read Rapunzel, when they are ready.
