A child who has once been pleased with a tale likes, as a rule, to have it retold in almost the same words, but this should not lead parents to treat printed fairly stories as formal texts. It is always much
better to tell a story than read it out of a book, and if a parent can produce what, in the actual situation
of the time and the child, is an improvement on the printed text, so much the better.
A charge made against fairy tales is that they harm the child by frightening him or making him sad
thinking. To prove the latter, one would have to show
in a controlled experiment that children who have
read fairy stories were more often sorry for cruelty than those who had not. As to fears, there are, in
think, some cases of children being dangerously terrified by some fairy story. Often, however, this arises
from the child having heard the story once. Familiarity with the story by repetition turns the pain of fear
into the pleasure of a fear faces and mastered.
There are also people who object to fairy stories on the grounds that they are not objectively true,
that giants, witches, two-headed dragons, magic carpets, etc. do not exist; and that , instead of being
fond of the strange side in fairy tales, the child should be taught to learn the reality by studying history. I
find such people, I must say so peculiar that I do not know how to argue with them. If their case were
sound, the world should be full of mad men attempting to fly from New York to Philadelphia on a stick
or covering a telephone with kisses in the belief that it was their beloved girlfriend.
No fairy story ever declared to be a description of the real world and no clever child has ever
believed that it was