Who Is Pig King: Is It Proper To Read A Fairy Tale?

Fairy tales, as we all know, always convey some simple and valuable opinions to children. They teach children some basic and simple norms of life. Dispensing justice and finding true love are always the core meanings of fairy tales. However, when I read the fairy tale thoroughly, I feel a little uncomfortable about it. The story Pig King is a story about finding true love. The prince of a country is born with a curse in which he has to marry 3 times to go back to human form, so the story describes that the prince killed the first two wives and lived with the third wife happily in human form. Its ending sounds reasonable and romantic, however, when I thought it carefully I raised a question: Is it proper to let kids read a tale that the prince

Here is an article from The New York Times titled “Are Fairy tales Too Scary for Children”, reports that “Of the 3,000 British parents polled by the TheBabyWebsite.com, earlier this month, 50 percent said they would not read fairy tales to their children until they were at least five-years-old.” From the survey, we can find out that the main audiences are kids, 50 percent under five-years-old and 50 percent above five-years-old. Thus the audiences are not old enough, the effects to the audiences should be focused on. “Of those, 20 percent said they rejected the oldies as politically incorrect, while close to that number, 17 percent, said the stories would give their children nightmares.” It seems the fact that the stories will give children nightmares is a real problem. 17 percent involves many kids and is a big number because of the big base of readers. It seems that some fairy tales are not fit for kids and should not be published, so there are also some solutions for this problem, which one of them is publishing the sanitized form of the original story. The most well-known example is the Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella, which is a very bloody and violent version of Cinderella, which “the nasty step-sisters cut off parts of their own feet in order to fit them into the glass slipper — hoping to fool the prince. The prince is alerted to the trickery by two pigeons who peck out the step

A report from childREACH discusses this topic, “Fairy tales offer new dimension to a child’s imagination. His imaginings can influence his own daydreams. Tales speak to children in the language of symbols. ” (childREACH) As we all know, when kids are young, the development of their thinking and imaginations is pretty important. Fairy tales give them the chance to image and think the real world in a unique way which gives them basic concepts such as the good and evil. Even their daydreams are also influenced by the fairy tales kids have read. “Fairy tales deal with the basic human condition. At the start of many tales, a mother or father dies. In the Grimm version of “Cinderella” her mother’s death is not a mere mention, but an integral part of the story in which Cinderella grieves and finds closure in a meaningful way.”(childREACH) Fairy tales give children basic human condition, the good and evil. They can give kids simple judgements and give them preliminary understandings of the world, which helps them learn other knowledge of the world easily and avoid to misbehave out of curiosity. “‘Fairy tales enrich a child’s life and give it an enchanted quality just because he does not quite know how the stories have worked their wonder on him.”(Bruno Bettelheim). Children of all ages can enjoy fairy tales, hence Disney’s foray into fairy