It turns out that not all parents are aware of the importance of fairy tales for children. In the UK, 25% of parents recently surveyed said they don't read fairy tales to children under five because they don't teach them anything, they teach them bad things or they're just too scary. For example, one of the reasons some parents don't read The Three Bears to their children is that they believe the story subtly teaches children that stealing is good. Hardly. Rather, the message contained in it can be interpreted in a slightly different way: do not break into someone else's house, because a family of bears can live there. Or interpreted in a more positive way.
The meaning of fairy tales
“If you want your children to be smart, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be even smarter, read them more fairy tales.” (Albert Einstein)
1. Fairy tales teach children how to deal with problems. We learn from fairy tale characters even as adults. Fairy tale characters help us because we connect their ups and downs with our own lives, dreams, anxieties and reflect on what we would do in their place. Fairy tales help children learn to understand this life and navigate it.
“Fairy tales do not tell children about the existence of dragons. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be defeated.” (Gilbert Keith Chesterton)
2. Fairy tales develop emotional resilience. Fairy tales tell about real problems that almost everyone faces, and they do it delicately, with the help of fantastic plots in which the protagonist most often triumphs (with the exception of the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm.) Being in the safe environment of their own family, children must understand for themselves that bad things can happen to anyone. Why? No one is immune from problems - that is why it is so necessary for us to reveal the potential of our children. Basically, there are two options: either we help them build their “emotional muscles” so they can use them during difficult times, or we constantly protect children, making them so weak that they become unable to cope with any problem that requires mental strength. .
3. Fairy tales teach us spoken language (cultural literacy and rules). We meet fairy tales in various paraphrases and pantomimes, they help us understand allegorical expressions and delicately express our opinion. We breathe them. We know them.
4. Fairy tales blur cross-cultural boundaries. In many cultures, there are fairy tales that are common to all, such as, for example, Cinderella, which have their own special cultural flavor. We read different versions and understand that all of us are characterized by a very important feature - the need to find the meaning of life through a certain story and hope for the victory of good over evil.
5. Fairy tales teach to understand the structure of the story. Fairy tales teach to understand the basics of any story - time and place of action, characters and plot (outsets, climaxes and denouement), as well as to understand the difference between fiction and scientific literature. When a child understands the principles of a story, it develops his ability to anticipate and understand the meaning of other stories he reads.
6. Fairy tales develop the child's imagination.
“When I analyze myself and my methods of thinking, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy means more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking” (Albert Einstein).
7. Fairy tales provide opportunities to teach critical thinking skills to children. You can just hate Disney's The Little Mermaid. A girl who gives up life itself for the sake of a boy should hardly become a role model for her daughters. Even the original version shows a seemingly weak woman who dies for a man (or at least suffers the consequences!) .
But ... This does not mean that children should be forbidden to read stories about a mermaid. A parent's attempt to protect a child will not teach critical thinking skills. And the disclosure of information and the conversation directed in the right direction will certainly teach!
8. Fairy tales teach lessons. Use fairy tales to teach morality to your child. What can a child learn from Ruslan and Lyudmila? What about Cinderella and Puss in Boots?
So, are there too scary fairy tales for children? Sometimes.
- You must take into account the age and developmental level of the child. We do not read to two-year-old children the fairy tale "Rapunzel" in the original, where the prince is blind and bloody, because the children will not understand it anyway. Use your parent logic. Let the children express their own opinions as well - they can tell you if they think this story is too scary or not.
- When reading fairy tales, it is necessary to take into account the time of day. Perhaps some stories should not be read at bedtime. Well, read them during the day!
Fairy tales should not be excluded from a child's life just because some of them are scary or politically incorrect. You can always find adapted versions of fairy tales that are more suitable for your child and your family.
In addition, fairy tales wonderfully establish a bond between a child and his parents. What could be nicer and more pleasant for a child than spending an evening with a mother who reads a fairy tale to him? And if the mother will also explain the actions of the heroes, share her opinion or find out the opinion of the child, then in addition to having a good time, this will also bring great benefits.
In essence, fairy tales are simple and understandable, especially folk tales, since they have been developed for centuries, passed from mouth to mouth. At the heart of all fairy tales is the confrontation between good and evil, stupidity and intelligence, beauty and ugliness, and therefore fairy tales are an ideal example for the first steps in our lives. Fairy tales are filled with allusions and repetitions, they are mythological - this is one of the reasons why children love fairy tales. For example, the fairy tale "Kotigoroshko" is about a boy who defeated the Serpent Gorynych. But in the world literature there are many such fairy tales. Russian, Ukrainian, French - they are all based on myths that are many, many years old. In childhood, a child is drawn to something familiar and understandable - this is their way of self-preservation, because they are so vulnerable at this age.
Fairy tales are very beautiful and there is magic in them. On the one hand, they are clear and simple, and on the other hand, there is always a miracle in them. As if there is no pain and evil, and if there is, then it is weak and easy to defeat. Starting to listen to fairy tales, children open the door to a magical land where magic lives and animals can speak. It is easy to believe in this, it can be easily realized by playing, it is pleasant to live with it.
In his head, the child endows objects, toys, animals, plants with living human characters, because it is important for him that all his fears and joys be expressed and personified. Dangers and some problems in a child are usually associated with dragons or monsters, which brave fairy-tale heroes must definitely defeat. Thus, a children's fairy tale, after being read by the child himself or his parents, has a beneficial psychological effect - it frees from negative emotions and various experiences.
Each reading is, in fact, a session of psychotherapeutic assistance to a child, since the “adult” world is fraught with many dangers and the child is often afraid of them. Despite the fact that the parents take care of the child, the baby is still faced with something new and incomprehensible every day, and this does not always end with a feeling of joy and delight. Sometimes experienced fear and stress requires a way out, and a fairy tale, in this sense, plays one of the key roles. A fairy tale can teach a kid to overcome difficulties, defeat enemies, not be afraid of dangers and hope for the best.
Although the text of the tale is simple, it is always very informative, as far as images are concerned. The child can develop the ability to dream, and the imagination becomes richer. Due to the young age, the child has some limitations that may prevent him from experiencing some emotions, however, in a fairy-tale reality, everything can be easily experienced by dreaming and fantasizing. Children love fairy tales, because a fairy tale for a child is a reality in which he does not feel like a defenseless little child, there he is a person, growing and developing.
1) Fairy tales are good helpers for adults! They can suggest how to act in a similar situation in life.
The plots of many fairy tales are saturated with optimism - we miss this so much in life!
2) A fairy tale is a wonderful simulator for fantasy, both the reader and the author.
More than once it happened that the ideas of fairy tales were subsequently embodied in life.
3) A fairy tale is an opportunity to talk with a child who lives in each of us.
This child wants to be loved. Childhood trauma comes out with tears.
Fairy tales for adults are a good way to help yourself, talk to yourself, help you forgive many things.
4) We know what kindness is, how to behave with dignity, but in real life we forget about values, about decency - a fairy tale, as a reflection of our conscience.
A fairy tale is a concentration of wisdom and moral norms!
Awakening forgotten feelings and experiences of childhood, fairy tales make life brighter!
5) To understand the world of a child, you need to remember yourself as a child - a fairy tale helps.
6) In our tough time, when we are inexorably stale, a fairy tale is simply necessary. It encodes important laws of life, thanks to which it is possible to maintain spiritual health.
7) A fairy tale can give rest to the soul and heart, help to recover from the bustle of life.
8) Fairy tales help to find confirmation of their own life observations. Adults sometimes need a fairy tale even more than children.
9) Fairy tales are like a reminder to yourself about important things that you dreamed about, and then forgot. For what? To move on for your guiding star. To not give up when the going gets tough.
10)Rereading a fairy tale, you are charged with energy and you can perform new feats! And then you can certainly be where you always wanted to be!
Reviews
Your "10 reasons" speak of great observation and originality of the author's mental abilities: to think, reflect and draw such deep conclusions is not given to everyone.
You have come up with an ingenious treatise-study called "What is a FAIRY TALE?"
I absolutely agree with all the conclusions you made.
Well, after the words that "a fairy tale is a concentration of wisdom and moral standards" - I would put at least ten exclamation marks or highlight these words in capital letters. There is holy truth in these words, and it seems to me that it is with these words that you need to start the 4th paragraph of your research, and then give it that brief transcript with which you began this paragraph.
Thank you for such a necessary, pleasant and unexpected gift to readers. Probably, he will make many "adults" think.
The daily audience of the Proza.ru portal is about 100 thousand visitors, who in total view more than half a million pages according to the traffic counter, which is located to the right of this text. Each column contains two numbers: the number of views and the number of visitors.
Reading fairy tales is simply necessary for the life of a child, for his development, the formation of the most important skills, for his adaptation in the social world, for his subsequent spiritual self-realization. The fact is that the most important universal knowledge is encrypted in the figurative and plot series of fairy tales. Moreover, this knowledge covers all spheres of human life:
- The area of relations between people;
- Tools for overcoming difficulties and resolving conflicts;
- Scenarios of "fighting evil" external and internal;
- Recommendations for dealing with stress;
- Typologies of people and ways of influencing them;
- Spiritual development of a person;
- Male and female psychology.
The figurative, symbolic language of the fairy tale is addressed directly to the subconscious, bypassing conscious barriers. Fairy tale after fairy tale, a symbolic bank of life situations and values is created in the subconscious. And the more fairy tales the child's subconscious absorbs, the more successful he will be in adulthood.
What book to choose for a child so that it is interesting to him, develops him and teaches good taste? The most important thing is to start reading to your child as early as possible. The book develops a child of any age, whether it is an accordion book of a couple of pages, or a three-hundred-page adventure novel without pictures.
It's no exaggeration to say that it's never too early to start reading to children. For the little ones, tongue twisters, poems and nursery rhymes are suitable, which should be melodic, rhythmic and focus on repetition. The monotonous rhythm helps to develop linguistic intuition and, moreover, lulls well. Later you can read short stories and fairy tales.
The most traditional are folk tales, passing from generation to generation, but practically remained unchanged. A child through a fairy tale lives fragments of the life of his favorite characters. Thus, as if programmed for certain actions in similar situations in his life. Through a fairy tale, it is easier and more clearly to explain to the child the common truths: do not offend the weak, do not deceive, be kind and responsive to the sorrows of others, not be a simpleton and be able to recognize deceit, intentions to harm you. No matter how full of showcases of bookstores with publications of contemporary authors, one should not be lazy to find folk tales for the youngest listeners, tales of the classics of Russian literature, and tales of the peoples of the world should not be bypassed. Moreover, these books are reprinted regularly, more vivid illustrations are added to their design. Listening to fairy tales, the child experiences pleasure, the child wants to hear, first of all, his mother's voice. Try to make the intonation and timbre of the voice radiate warmth and evoke pleasant sensations. Connect all the senses of the child. Point your finger at the picture in the book and name them. In addition, the fairy tale makes the child think, connect imagination and fantasy. At the same time, there is no direct moralizing in the fairy tale, the fairy tale teaches, but not intrusively. For older children, you can regularly use this game: we read a fairy tale, stop before the denouement and invite the child to come up with an ending himself. You can play in this way with the same fairy tale as many times as you like, until the child's interest in the process runs out. This method is widely used in fairy tale therapy, in addition, psychologists often recommend giving the child the opportunity to come up with a fairy tale on his own, in which the characters can sometimes perform very illogical, somewhere wrong, according to their parents, actions.
Magic stories (fairy tales) are a storehouse of all kinds of cases from real life. They can be considered excellent teaching aids. With their help, the child learns the world and its complex laws. Perhaps the story he heard will help solve the baby's important problem for him.
Let's draw conclusions why a child needs fairy tales:
- A fairy tale is a golden key to the soul of a child.
- Fairy-tale characters help the child to become kinder, more responsive and bolder.
- The vocabulary is replenished, logic, fantasy and imagination develop.
- Learn to understand what is good and evil.
- Empathy for the hero formsmercy and compassion.
- Memory training and formulation of thoughts when discussing what has been read.
- Independent reading helps to learn punctuation and spelling in the future.
- Reading calm fairy tales with happy endings can solve sleep problems.
- Family readings aloud and discussion of works bring children and parents closer.
What child doesn't like fairy tales?
If there are such children, then their number is very small.
As a rule, children like to be either read to or told magical stories. And it often happens that if mom-dad-grandfather or some other educator forgets or simply misses some fragment, the child immediately protests: “Why didn’t you tell about this or that”!
Why do we need fairy tales at a certain moment in our lives? Why do they become an integral part of a certain period of our development?
- From a psychoanalytic point of view, fairy tales help the child overcome the difficulties of growing up and cope with crises of normal development.
- The child needs to understand himself, his needs and opportunities to communicate with the world in which he lives.
- He needs to understand how to cope with those emotions and feelings that fill him, and bring them into a certain order.
- He also needs to get acquainted with the concept of morality - not in a dry didactic form, but in an everyday real image, which will be filled with meaning that will be remembered for a lifetime.
And this is what the child receives through the fairy tale.
Regardless of the cultural and / or intellectual level of the "listener", fairy tales provide information to various substances of the psyche that "use" it at one time or another. Children are at the mercy of their emotions and impulses, which are often invisible and invisible, and fairy tales offer them options for how to deal with them and what decisions to make both now and in the future.
What are the normal challenges a child has to deal with as they grow up?
According to psychoanalytic theory, from the very moment of birth, the child is completely concentrated only on himself and on his desires. Then people close to him, who are, as it were, guides to the world around him, fall into the circle of his “interests”. After that, the world gradually expands, and the child finds himself in a multifaceted, complex and huge reality.
Of course, this is a very simplified outline of psychoanalytic developmental theory. But the fact is that we all go down this path and meet the need
- give up their exclusive own desires and motives;
- overcome conflicts in the perception of our parents and the definition of their place in the family structure;
- accept and understand the role and place of other children in the family structure;
- renounce childhood addiction;
- build your own identity and self;
- make moral commitments...
From birth, a child needs to understand what is happening in his mind and meet his unconscious world. And in this he is helped by fairy tales, which not only in their content offer the children's imagination to reach a new level and expand its boundaries and dimensions, but also in their form and structure make it possible to structure their fantasies and direct them in the right direction.
Do we know of any fairy tale where the hero does not have to face difficulties along the way?? How does he overcome them? Fairy tales prepare the child for the fact that in life everything is never smooth and without problems. And you don't have to be scared!
In real life, we are constantly faced with problems and difficulties, and this is inevitable. Fairy tales teach that if you overcome obstacles and do not run away from them, if you are able to cope with hardships, sometimes very unfair, then in the end you achieve your goal.
The moral component of fairy tales indicates that it is impossible to achieve results through robbery, robbery or violence. That is why in all stories there is a "negative" hero - a dragon, a witch, Baba Yaga ... At some point, this "monster" achieves his goal, but in the end, good good heroes defeat him.
As a rule, the child is identified with positive characters, but at the same time, on a different level of the psyche, the presence of “dragon witches” indicates the presence of “bad” impulses that the child has to fight in his subconscious or unconscious world.
And the fairy tale shows that, on the one hand, it's normal to want to destroy everything, spoil it, kill it in the end, and on the other hand, the positive hero always wins, i.e. good good feelings and emotions take up over negative ones.
At present, a lot of different new stories and fairy tales have appeared, but, as a rule, these trendy books do not carry all the semantic load that was mentioned above. It is not for nothing that fairy tales were formed by the people and the duration of their life is endless. And for these folk wisdom there are no boundaries, no time!
