Plenty of parents wonder whether fairy tales are worth reading at all. What does a small child gain from stories that exist only in a writer's imagination? Would it not be more useful to read about real people and real events? Most parents have a lifetime of experience to draw on — so why does telling a child about it rarely work as well as a story about a talking wolf?
The answer is that a child under five sees the world differently. Many words and ideas either mean nothing yet or mean something quite unlike what an adult intends. Death is one of the hardest. A young child's mind protects itself from the finality of it, and tends to understand it as a change of form, a transformation into something else. Fairy tales explain difficult situations and difficult choices in terms a child can hold, and they do it below the level of argument. Their characters teach the difference between cruelty and kindness. Simple words and vivid images plant an early sense of fairness, generosity and friendship. You can explain all of this in a straightforward conversation, and it will mostly slide off. Told as a story, it stays.
Which stories work best?
Traditional folk tales are hard to beat — every culture has its own body of them, worn smooth by generations of retelling. Their characters and their plain moral sense carry ideas a child will still be drawing on as an adult. Evening is the natural time for them: a child settling down for sleep is relaxed and takes things in readily. It is worth spending a few minutes afterwards talking the story over. That short conversation is often where the understanding actually happens.
Matching the story to the age
The older the child, the more intricate the plot can be. As a rough guide:
- At three or four, the easiest stories are the ones whose characters are animals a child already knows — cats, dogs, birds.
- At four or five, the cast can widen: animals and people together, dealing with one another.
- From five, children begin to see themselves in the characters. This is the age of brave knights, kind sorceresses, fair kings and clever princesses.
- From six, children can invent plots of their own. Making up a story together with a parent is worth far more than it looks: it is one of the clearest windows you will get into what your child is actually thinking about, and what is worrying them.
A story is not only a pleasant way to end the day. The minutes spent on it are remembered for years, and they do real work in shaping the person a child becomes.
