Why Fairytales Still Matter
Yes, even the “problematic” ones
The Secret Garden by Francis Hodgson Burnett is a classic work of children’s literature. It follows a grieving orphan who, through the act of restoring a long-forgotten garden, brings healing to her widowed her uncle, her ill cousin and their whole household. In its bones, it’s about as wholesome as a story can get. So when I was directing it for a community theater this Spring, you can imagine my shock when a fellow parent said, “It sounds lovely, but I’m not sure we’re ready for that.” Imagine my confusion. Ready for what? “Death.” She whispered, perhaps a little dramatically. “My children are very sensitive.” This stumped me, and I’ve been thinking a lot about it.
When children receive poor grades, or lose privileges for neglecting responsibilities, or fall off their bike and skin their knee, they learn. When we fix the bad grades and use words instead of consequences and don’t allow activities that could lead to (minor) injuries, we take away childhood friction, which takes away rehearsal for adult friction.
Having the privilege to work with young performers at the university level, I’ve noticed a trend in the current generation that I’ve never seen to this degree before: conflict avoidance to the extreme. The majority of my students will not write or even respond to e-mails because they have anxiety. Performing arts students are chronically afraid to perform in front of their peers. I even have students who spend most of their day hungry because they are too socially anxious to go to the dining hall at peak hours. Emotional safety has become paramount, overshadowing responsibility, future goals, and even basic needs.
“But, Angela,” you cry, “How can I provide food, clean the house, work a full-time job that fulfills me and teach them grit, determination and resilience ALL BY MY SELF!?!?!” An excellent question. Thank you for asking. You Can’t.
Children were never meant to be raised by their parents. They were meant to be raised by their village. Home is meant to be a haven, but it was never meant to be the extremity of a child’s world. They were meant to be out “there” running into other problems and other ideas and other people. And what they encounter out “there”—most powerfully—are stories.
The stories our children encounter have changed drastically over the last 20 years. Just for fun, let’s take a look at Disney from the year my college seniors were born through today. In the 2000’s we had movies with clear morality and external evil: The Princess and the Frog and Brother Bear for instance. Classic fairytale ideology of transformation through trial and consequence. The bad guys were clear and the good guys really had something to aim at. Jump to the 2010’s. Movies like Frozen, Brave and Tangled come along. The bad guys are ideas, family troubles become the center of stories, and the conflict pulls back to live inside the protagonist. There is suddenly nothing to fight but yourself. In 2016 we began to see movies like Zootopia and Moana, where the problems become contextual, not physical. Understanding becomes a more important skill than overcoming. And now the 2020’s: Encanto, Inside Out and Coco all bring us plots structured around emotional conflict and self-expression. If I could just get what’s inside of me out, everyone around me will accept me and I will be ok.
And we wonder why they are too afraid to respond to e-mails…
The progression is an easy one to understand. No well-balanced adult would find fault with these messages. But what we have that our children do not is the full structure to keep it in place. They are seeing the twisted fairytales before the real ones. Without the scaffolding of traditional right vs. wrong, our children are building their moral compass on shifting sand.
Back to fairytales. Children getting their heads cut off, women using marriage as an escape from slavery, and ridiculous tropes like “And they lived happily ever after.” What? How could these stories possibly help anything?
Think of these stories like a sandbox. Heroes and heroines are rarely given names, their situations are so far out there that they are almost impossible to imagine, and the characters they come across are categorical and easy to identify. A child can easily slip into the shoes of a character and walk around a situation. They can look at the death of a beloved parent or senseless violence against the weak or generational curses and draw their own conclusions about them. For all the times I read as a child about children being chopped up by their parents and/or older siblings, I have to say that the gruesome part of it was never what I thought about. My imagination had no context for the brutality of that act. What I did understand from it was simply the powerful inflicting themselves upon the powerless, and how the powerless could rise above. That was a thing I needed to help me navigate the bullies at school. That is how fairytales build resilient human beings.
Fairytales live at a perfect cross section of innocence and inhuman hardship where children can sit with their own feelings. They can practice those moments in their heads and decide what they feel should have happened. They can build up a moral framework of courage, mercy, discernment and humility. Kindness and cruelty become parts of their vocabulary. They can fight the dragon and come out the better for it. They can pause to listen to the little old woman and find their heart’s desire. They can fail and know it’s only the very beginning of the story.
Fairytales are for rehearsal. As parents, we must come back to allowing our children the chance to practice standing their ground and failing the first time.
