Fairy-tales – if you had a decent childhood, you certainly remember them. Maybe your parents read them to you before you get to sleep? Maybe your grandma was telling you the stories? And most likely it was a very pleasant experience to you.
Today many parents do not have time to read books to their young children, or do not find any benefits of showing their children the fantasy world of fairy-tales – they take them out of reality, some might say.
But those people are totally missing the point of fairy-tales and how children absorb them. I’ve always read tales to my child – thanks to the publisher Svetoslav Kantardjiev and New Media Group they haven’t yet disappeared on the market in Bulgarian. I’ve found that fairy-tales are usually not taking children on a “psychedelic drug-like trip” out of reality. Not at all. All fairy-tales are doing are to give children some very important metaphorical lessons. Their brains work mostly on symbols and emotions, not on logic and words, like the adults’. Fairy-tales are the closest way to convey some of life’s most basic lessons – like emotion control, important virtues and values and so on.
So it is not only negligence, but a cruelty if you miss those in a child’s development and education. I would like to finish this article with a quote by the comic writer Neil Gaiman, which is entirely in tune with my argument above: “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” Tags: