Last week we covered a couple of children stories (Snow White and The Sandman) and one thing they definitely had in common is that they were both pretty creepy. Because I can’t really wrap my head around the moral purpose of Snow White, my question revolves more around The Sandman. Are children so hard to get to bed that they need to be threatened with a stranger barging into their room, stealing their eyes, and rendering them blind for the rest of their lives to do it?

In the folktale of The Sandman (not to be confused with the text we read), a child loses his eyes because he didn’t go to bed at the time his mother told him to. In The Little Red Riding Hood, for example, Red loses her grandmother and gets eaten because she talked to a stranger. I’m pretty sure we’ve all been told that if we held a funny face for too long, it would stick. Before I wrote this, I tried to think of a famous fable with a reasonable moral that didn’t use a fearful (and sometimes grotesque) threat against a child’s wellbeing to convey its moral across to its audience. I could only think of one, even in choosing to analyze the more modern version adapted for our own generation’s consumption. Why must we scare kids into doing what we know is best for them?

From experience, I know that children don’t always know what is best for them and after what feels like (or literally could be) hours, a caretaker usually just wants something easy for them to do and hard for the kids to ignore. A story is very easy to tell, and fear, at any age, is very difficult to ignore. Scary stories don’t need to be logical (wolves can totally pass off as grandmas), but they can still be just as effective. But how effective is it really? If we take the moral of Little Red Riding Hood we learn that we shouldn’t talk to strangers. But the older you get, the more surrounded by strangers you become. We see strangers as a step before acquaintances or even friends rather than wolves intent on harming us and our families. And if someone maintains the view that everyone is a wolf, they generally find it more difficult to adapt to the dominantly extroverted culture of today.

What I’m trying to say is that we grow up to learn that these stories were made to scare us into the actions they encouraged. Once we realize this, we end up talking to strangers, going to bed pretty late, and making funny faces all day long.

This got a lot longer (and a lot less organized) than I intended it to be, but I just wanted to also mention that not abusing children’s immaturity goes a very long way. The one fable I could think of that wasn’t scary, the tortoise and the hare, is still one that is relevant to my life today (Pace yourself. Be humble. Believe in your abilities. Focus on your own goals rather how close other people may be to reaching the same goals.). Sure, it takes a bit more effort to think of a story for children that meets the criteria of being interesting to children, morally relevant (even in the face of changing generations), and effectively serves its purpose. But in an ideal world, I’d much rather put my child to bed with a warm cup of milk than a nightmare.

Last week we covered a couple of children stories (Snow White and The Sandman) and one thing they definitely had in common is that they were both pretty creepy. Because I can’t really wrap my head around the moral purpose of Snow White, my question revolves more around The Sandman. Are children so hard to get to bed that they need to be threatened with a stranger barging into their room, stealing their eyes, and rendering them blind for the rest of their lives to do it?

In the folktale of The Sandman (not to be confused with the text we read), a child loses his eyes because he didn’t go to bed at the time his mother told him to. In The Little Red Riding Hood, for example, Red loses her grandmother and gets eaten because she talked to a stranger. I’m pretty sure we’ve all been told that if we held a funny face for too long, it would stick. Before I wrote this, I tried to think of a famous fable with a reasonable moral that didn’t use a fearful (and sometimes grotesque) threat against a child’s wellbeing to convey its moral across to its audience. I could only think of one, even in choosing to analyze the more modern version adapted for our own generation’s consumption. Why must we scare kids into doing what we know is best for them?

From experience, I know that children don’t always know what is best for them and after what feels like (or literally could be) hours, a caretaker usually just wants something easy for them to do and hard for the kids to ignore. A story is very easy to tell, and fear, at any age, is very difficult to ignore. Scary stories don’t need to be logical (wolves can totally pass off as grandmas), but they can still be just as effective. But how effective is it really? If we take the moral of Little Red Riding Hood we learn that we shouldn’t talk to strangers. But the older you get, the more surrounded by strangers you become. We see strangers as a step before acquaintances or even friends rather than wolves intent on harming us and our families. And if someone maintains the view that everyone is a wolf, they generally find it more difficult to adapt to the dominantly extroverted culture of today.

What I’m trying to say is that we grow up to learn that these stories were made to scare us into the actions they encouraged. Once we realize this, we end up talking to strangers, going to bed pretty late, and making funny faces all day long.

This got a lot longer (and a lot less organized) than I intended it to be, but I just wanted to also mention that not abusing children’s immaturity goes a very long way. The one fable I could think of that wasn’t scary, the tortoise and the hare, is still one that is relevant to my life today (Pace yourself. Be humble. Believe in your abilities. Focus on your own goals rather how close other people may be to reaching the same goals.). Sure, it takes a bit more effort to think of a story for children that meets the criteria of being interesting to children, morally relevant (even in the face of changing generations), and effectively serves its purpose. But in an ideal world, I’d much rather put my child to bed with a warm cup of milk than a nightmare.