Tales of fantasy have real benefits

IN OLDEN TIMES, when wishing still I helped, there lived a king whose daughters were all beautiful, but the youngest was so beautiful that the sun itself, which has seen so much, was astonished whenever it shone in her face."

These dreamy opening lines of The Frog King from the Brothers Grimm collection of fairytales seem as far removed from CD-ROM encylopaedias as Cinderella does from your average 1990s' child. Yet it is precisely this other worldliness that makes fairytales as important for children now as they were 100 years ago.

You only have to watch how children become enthralled by pantomines to understand their need for the good guys to be rewarded and the baddies punished. The late child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim believed that fairytales were so crucial to a child's psychological development that their absence could cause emotional insecurity in childhood and later on in adult life.

"When all the child's wishful thinking gets embodied in a good fairy; all his destructive wishes in an evil witch; all his fears in a voracious wolf; all his jealous anger in some animal that pecks out the eyes of his archrivals - then the child can finally begin to sort out his contradictory tendencies," Bettelheim wrote in The Uses of Enchantment

This process, according to Bettelheim, allows children to accept irrationality as an integral part of their being. However, the problem nowadays is that television has, for many children, come to replace storytelling and the reading of fairytales. Many child psychologists are beginning to recognise that most television programmes don't and can't offer children the rich magical experiences that are the essence of fairytales.

As one psychologist comments, "children find it very difficult to make up stories from their own dreams and imagination now. Their imagination becomes invaded by the fantasies from television and they lose all confidence in their own creative sense.

Fairytales, by their very nature, begin simply, then take the child through fantastic events - only to return him or her to a reassuring and usually morally correct conclusion, with rewards and punishments meted out appropriately.

It is this aspect of moral rectitude that is so valuable to the growing child, says a child psychologist. "The triumph of evil is too threatening for the young child. Fairytales show a consistency of theme, where good always triumphs, which is so reassuring to the child.

"You can be brought to the edge of danger, but you will always be rescued. It is this strong healing quality which helps children make sense of and work through their ordinary, everyday joys and fears."

Attracta Madden firmly believes that fairytales play a vital role in the psychological development of her four-year-old daughter, Laura Blaise McDowell. "In a stable, loving home environment, children don't usually come across cruelty, evil and lying, yet such badness does exist in the world. In a subconscious way, fairytales can train children to be aware that everything in the world isn't necessarily good," she says.

"Also, fairytales can teach children that people who look evil aren't necessarily bad. Oscar Wilde's Selfish Giant, for instance, is a big gruff character on the outside, but his kindness emerges as the story progresses - and as he realise that by being kind, he is bringing summer into his own life.

"Bad fairies can also disguise themselves for evil intent, and children can pick up on this very easily," she adds.

MADDEN RECKONS that the benefits of such stories to her daughter go beyond their morality. "Fairytales also bring rich imagery into Laura's life. They broaden her horizons in every direction as well as helping her develop a good sense of morality.

"However, it is very important for parents not to destroy the magic of fairytales by analysing what happens. A child will know instinctively how a fairytale should end," she says.

Bruno Bettelheim did, however, urge some caution about the modern fairytale, which begins and ends in the child's familiar surroundings. "Stories which stay closer to reality by starting in a child's living room or backyard instead of in a poor woodcutter's hut, and which have people in them very much like the child's parents, not kings or queens, and mix these realistic elements with wish-fulfilling and fantastic devices are apt to confuse the child as to what is real and what is not," he commented.

"Such true-to-reality stories can also draw the child to conclude that his inner reality is unacceptable to his parents and may result in the child rejecting this rich inner life," he argued.

It is this rich inner life that needs to be protected and nourished in our children through the telling and reading of fairytales - even in these days of intergalactic space odysseys.