Importance of Fairy Tales

1. Without rich vocabulary we can never have quality communication. All sorts of stories for kids are made exactly for that: to enrich children's vocabulary. With books for kids learning new words is fast and fun process.

Fairy tales are stories with classic structure: introduction, body and conclusion. They help children with organizing some sometimes not so easy understandable or too abstract terms like time (before, than), relatives (son, father, grand father), consequences (action, reaction)... All these give them opportunity to understand others and improve their own narration skills.

 (Image credit: Clker.com, PD licence)

2. Imagination is obvious association when we talk about fairy tales. It seem just everything is possible in a fairy tale. Beggar can become a king, a king can be transformed into a frog and even death is not irreversible process. We deal with magic mirrors, flying carpets, cloaks of invisibility and only the imagination is the limit.

As Albert Einstein said: “Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”

3. Every fairy tale is of course made around problem (or problems) and finding ways to solve it (them). Stories present very different problems and many of them look unsolvable but in the end (well, in most cases) problem is solved and main character achieves something what seemed out of his reach.

4. In most times the hero of the story have to repeat some tasks to reach the goal or maybe he (she) has to spend many years to find the solution to his (her) problem. This way fairy tales are telling no problem is too big if we persist in finding ways to solve it. Living in 21st century where jobs are unreliable and live constantly demands new knowledge and new skills from us, creativity should be appreciated more than ever.

5. Fairy tales came from other (sometimes very distant) places and other times to talk to us here and now. With fairy tales it is very easy to explain out children how looked life centuries ago, how were relations in society than and how some things have changed and other have not.

With folk tales we don't only learn about different customs, different people, different patterns of thinking but how some things can actually be changed too!

6. Fairy tales and their relatives like myths, legends, fables... help us finding the answers on most difficult question in human history: "Who we are?", "Why are we here?" and "Where are we going?"

7. We live in alienated times where the main problem is lack of time. Parents, especially in families where both parents build their careers, simply don't have enough time to be with their kids.

Many families in most developed countries can find only few minutes (!) per day for so important thing as building family bonds. With so little time it is so much more important to spend it wise. And what can be more genuine than storytelling with optional talk after the story ends? Fairy tales are great to make deep and powerful bonds for connecting generations.

With storytelling and talking about outcome of the fairy tale we can build solid cornerstones for decades of quality communication!

8. Sense of community is social, sociological and psychological concept, an invisible glue which holds together a lot of individuals and connect them in powerful unity where one plus one makes more than two. Sharing fairy tales and similar stories through different circles of the society we can feel how many similarities we really have no matter how different we look to each other at first sight.

European countries like Italy or Germany were build from many small entities with a help of fairy tales collectors!

(Image credit: Clker.com, PD licence)

9. Fairy tales have extremely powerful consolation effect. No matter what happens, children know there is still hope right to the end of the story. Yes, in most cases happy ending does the trick, but there are also many beautiful fairy tales with sad ending (think about Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen) with just as powerful impact.

We shall never forget how important was considered classical Greek tragedy for its catharsis and we shall never prevent our kids from all the sorrow in this world. They will experience it sooner or later and it is much better to learn a thing or two safe in our laps than alone and unprepared in the cold streets.

10. If I would have to choose only one benefit of fairy tales for children, it would be empathy. Through stories kids learn to compassion with characters, they identify with their problems and they learn from their experience.

Empathy is not in top demand nowadays but it is the one making us human. If we want our species to remain human, we should definitely read fairy tales to our children.

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