HOW CHILDREN FAIL: Fear and Failure.
Some people say that it is bad to read old-fashioned fairy tales to little children, because they make them afraid. But even without fairy tales, the lives of little children are full of fears. Like very primitive people, they live in a world that they cannot begin to understand. Fairy tales could do for small children, and indeed did for many years, what myth, ritual, and religion did for primitive peoples -- give their fears a name and an identity, a handle to take hold of and perhaps to cast them out by. A child who can chan- nel his fear of the unknown into a fear of ghosts, witches, ogres, giants, wicked fairies, and the like, may be able to rid himself of much of that fear when he finds that such things do not exist. Even if not, he will have had practice in dealing with fear, in facing and thinking about what he is afraid of.A small boy I knew, when he was about four, used to tell to any sympathetic listener endless stories about his particular monster, which he called a Mountain-Lion-Eater. I suppose he had begun with stories about a mountain lion, that being the fiercest thing he could think of, and had later learned enough about real mountain lions to feel that they were not large or terrible enough to contain all the fear and terror that he wanted to put into them. But some- thing that ate mountain lions!-that might just fill the bill. And this was no ordinary monster. He ate up, not only mountain lions, but houses, neighborhoods, cities, even the whole world, when he was in the mood. In some stories, the little boy overcame the monster; in others, the monster ate him up. It all depended on how he felt at the time. In either case, his private mythology did him a great service by enabling him in part to see from outside and acknowledge his courage or his fear.