Why Children Need Fairy Tales

From Cinderella’s humility to St. George’s courage, fairy tales tell of goodness, evil, and truth that endures.

Fairy tales engage a child's heart and imagination while teaching them lessons about good and evil. Biba Kayewich

Down through the slow drip of centuries, certain fairy stories have remained with us, somehow uniquely untouched by the erosion of time. They’ve become a standard part of a child’s upbringing. Even today, when reading is rarer than it once was, most children are familiar with Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Saint George and the Dragon. True, many fairy tales have been retold and adapted, and many children know more about the Disney version than the Grimm version, but the basic structure and appeal of fairy tales have endured remarkably well. Some fairy tales date as far back as the Bronze Age yet are still being told today.

Clearly, fairy tales have a strange power that continues to fire the imaginations of children—and of many adults.

While some have argued that fairy tales are outdated and should be set aside, I believe our children should be reading more of them, not less. Following the thought of three great apologists for myth and fairy tales—C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and G.K. Chesterton—I see great depths of riches in fairy tales, riches that are hard for children to get anywhere else.

Morality and Goodness

Fairy tales engage a child's heart and imagination while teaching them lessons about good and evil. Biba Kayewich

In the first place, fairy tales illustrate moral lessons in a way that engages children’s hearts and imaginations alongside their minds. Cinderella shows us the reward for humility and patience. Beauty and the Beast demonstrates that, sometimes, loving someone who seems unlovable will reveal the beauty hidden within them. Plenty of other tales teach lessons about the importance of honesty, quick-thinking, courage, and so on—and the hurt that follows on the heels of vice. And the lessons are expressed through vivid images that stay in the mind and heart of the child long after the last page.

Fairy tales have the rare power to distill reality into clearly recognizable images of good, evil, beauty, ugliness, truth, falsehood, nobility, baseness, and so on. Because they’re intensely concentrated and embodied in tactile images and symbols, these representations have a potency equal to a strong medicine. Or, to take another metaphor, just as a bottle of an essential oil gives off the strong scent of its essence, so also the elemental images in fairy stories communicate the essences of things more clearly than many other types of story. Children breathe in a deep understanding of the moral universe through fairy tales.

The dragon of myth gives a face—and limbs and talons and a tail—to evil, helping children to understand something of the nature of evil in a way they can grasp: It is selfish, destructive, consuming, and cruel. Of course, if it stopped there, the educative power of fairy tales would be limited. More important than the dragons and monsters are the heroes and fair valleys and castles and other images of beauty, goodness, and civilization that fairy tales offer in opposition to the dragons.

Preparation for Life

One of the most significant reasons children ought to read fairy tales is that they provide critical life training. I mean that seriously—in the sense that fairy tales teach children that obstacles and evils can be overcome by goodness.

C.S. Lewis explained that children need to read fairy tales so that they begin to understand how to confront and conquer the evils that they will face in life.

“Since it is so likely that [children] will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage,” Lewis argues.

He says this in response to those who think fairy tales unnecessarily frighten children; Lewis points out that children need to be introduced to the concept of evil (which will happen one way or another anyway) in an age-appropriate way through fairy tales, and as an important parallel, they need to be introduced to the forces of good that can defeat evil.

This deep faith in the possibility of the ultimate triumph of the good isn’t just nice to have. One might say it’s among the most important convictions that can be gifted to a child because it is among the most necessary certitudes for adults as they make their way through the dark wood of this world (to use the apt fairy-tale imagery). We can learn this conviction through the vicarious experience provided by story.

G.K. Chesterton also addressed this same point, noting that children already from an early age have some conception of dragons and monsters, produced in their own imagination. And for that reason especially, they need fairy tales.

In “Tremendous Trifles,” Chesterton writes: “Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear. ... The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.”

Fairy tales become a means for overcoming fear and developing courage and hope—something every child will need, now and in later life.

Chesterton continues, “Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him [through] a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear.”

A Sense of Wonder

Finally, fairy tales nurture a spirit of wonder in children. They open to children the notion that this world, too, is in some sense enchanted. “Ordinary” things can take on a new sheen of mystery and beauty for the child steeped in fairy tales. Consider these words of the great fantasy writer J.R.R. Tolkien in his essay “On Fairy Stories”:

“Actually fairy-stories deal largely, or (the better ones) mainly, with simple or fundamental things, untouched by Fantasy, but these simplicities are made all the more luminous by their setting. ... It was in fairy-stories that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine.”

Chesterton, too, picked up on this idea, commenting in his book “Orthodoxy”: “Fairy tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.”

The child trained through fairy tales to look on the world with wonder will see more and love more than the child who has not read these stories. This stimulation of wonder is more important than it might sound, not just for forming gratitude and joy, but for building up civilization itself. As I’ve written before, wonder forms the basis of all wisdom and philosophy.

The child who’s been formed by fairy tales and initiated into wonder will grow up with a wordless yearning for fair fields and trees sparkling with dew and waterfalls clearer than air and many-spired castles rising like upraised swords, pointing to the sky. That this yearning for a fairytale land must, like other interests of childhood, mature and grow over time does not make it any less important. The exact form and shape this longing will take in adulthood lies beyond the scope of this article, but I will say simply that the person with a yearning like that possesses a kind of inner compass that will serve him or her well in life. He or she will feel “hiraeth,” the old Welsh word referring to a longing for a homeland.

I will conclude by returning to C.S. Lewis, who, in “The Weight of Glory,” expresses this sort of mysterious nostalgia I’m trying to describe, a nostalgia that good fairy tales are especially good and provoking: “These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire. ... For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

A fairy-tale-inspired wanderlust and nostalgia help us keep searching for the best and most beautiful things the world has to offer.