CC3- Fairy tales

FAIRYTALES

I’m Sailee Sansgiri. Death metal chick. Grammar Nazi. Snow Queen Extraordinaire.

Now, how many of you would believe that my favorite movie happens to be Tangled?

Yes, the sappy, gooey Disney musical retelling the story of Rapunzel. Not only that, how many of you can possibly believe that I actually cried when Flynn rider looked into Rapunzel’s glistening green orbs and told her, “You were my dream”?

Good evening toastmasters and guests. Today, I will be speaking about how fairy tales are good for children.

What do Charles Dickens, Joseph Campbell, Albert Einstein and Rudolph Steiner have in common?

A Love of Fairy Tales.

All of these great thinkers felt that fairy should be an integral part of every childhood. Fairy tales- the world of whimsical castles and ferocious beasts lurking in the shadows. The land of fair maidens and princes riding on stallions. A world where no dream remains unfulfilled, no wish remains unanswered.

These have been a part of traditions, handed down from generation to generation and told with love. Fairy tales, in their classic form, integrate literature, morality and human understanding

For one, fairy tales help improve your child’s vocabulary. My parents believed that children should be exposed to the wonderful world of literature at a very young age. Naturally, I couldn’t start reading Hamlet at age 6, so I started the next best thing-Cinderella. And trust me, it sucked me into the world of literature like that. The best way to develop an interest in literature is to make your child read the fairytales themselves, as opposed to the parents reading it out to them.

Fairy tales are simply magical. They may provide a window to another world, a chance to look beyond the mundane. They nurture and nourish a kid’s imagination. I remember reading out this fairy tale to my 5 year old niece, called Mary’s child  and the awe and wonder on her face was priceless. The original Grimm fairy tales include vivid description which further aids to develop the child’s imagination.

Most importantly, they teach a child life lessons.

 In Goldilocks and the Three Bears, most people are familiar with the ending in which Goldilocks runs away and is never seen again. In the longer classic version, Goldilocks actually comes back and helps repair the chair and also helps the mother cook more food. She remains friends with the bear family and comes back to visit periodically. The lesson being, when you do something wrong, you make it up to the other person. These are building blocks of friendship.

In Cinderella, at the end of the story when Cinderella moves to the castle and marries the prince, she invites the stepsisters to live in the castle, the moral being ‘forgiveness.’

In Little Red Riding Hood, after the wolf is killed there is another part to the story. Little Red Riding hood is again approached by another wolf on a trip to Grandmother’s house and this time she remembers not do talk with him and does not stray from the path. After arriving at Grandmother’s house she tells the grandmother about this second wolf and they come up with a plan to keep this wolf from eating them. The moral is ‘learning from your mistakes.’

Beauty and the beast tells all of us to look beyond physical attributes of a person.

Every single fairy tale, has a hidden moral in it, which has a big impact on the child’s psychology

Fairy tales speak directly to the natural morality in the child and to his or her sense of moral order in the world. When the good wins and the evil is punished, a child is visibly satisfied. The child identifies with the hero in the story and the hero always has resolution in the end.

Pessimists will still argue that Fairy tales are highly impractical; they give children false ideas which are brutally destroyed when the child grows up.

It amazes me how we can complain about fairy tales which spark the imagination of children and do no harm. 

Should we just let our small children be exposed to the violence and selfishness that adults have for each other or should we let children be children instead of smaller examples of ourselves? When you take away the imagination from a child, you take away the building blocks of an ideal society, for imagination fuels hopes and dreams. 

As the child grows up, he automatically starts distinguishing between what is right and wrong. Somehow, somewhere he loses his innocence. It is because of these fairy tales that the child will have a part of his heart, albeit tiny, which will always be optimistic. It is this optimism that will helps overcome hurdles and difficulties in life, because he will believe that his fairy tale will always have a happy ending, so he will try best to strive to achieve the happy ending of his life. 

A wonderful quote by author Neil Gaiman sums it all up. “Fairytales are more than true. Not because they teach you that dragons are real, but because they teach you that dragons can be slain”.