A child who has once been pleased with a tale likes, as a
rule, to have it retold in identically the same words, but this should not lead
parents to treat printed fairy stories as sacred texts. It is always much better
to tell a story than to read it out of a book and, if a parent can produce 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
arousing his sadistic impulses. To prove the latter, one would have to show in a
controlled experiment that children who have read fairy stories were more often
guilty of cruelty than those who had not. On the whole, their symbolic verbal
discharge seems to be rather a safety valve than an incitement to overt action.
As to fears, there are, I think, well-authenticated cases of children being
dangerously terrified by some fairy story. Often, however, this arises from the
child having been told the story on only one occasion. Familiarity with the
story by repetition turns the pain of fear into the pleasure of a fear faced and
mastered. There are also people who object to fairy stories on
the grounds that they are not objectively tree, that giants, witches, two-headed
dragons, magic carpets, etc., do not exist; and that, instead of indulging his
fantasies in fairy tales, the child should be taught how to adapt to reality by
studying history and mechanics. I find such people, I must confess, so
unsympathetic and peculiar that I do not know how to argue with them. If their
cases were sound, the world should be full of madmen attempting to fly from New
York to Philadelphia on a broomstick or covering a telephone with kisses in the
belief that it was their enchanted girlfriend. No fairy story
ever claimed to be a description of the external world and no sane child has
ever believed that it was. Some others think children should study history and mechanics rather than reading fairy stories because they think ______.