6 ms·

My point to add is that Fairy tales are not always (maybe not often?) children friendly by modern standards. Same as modern day "cartoons". They can have quite

My point to add is that Fairy tales are not always (maybe not often?) children friendly by modern standards. Same as modern day "cartoons". They can have quite graphic content. My wife and I were reading from a "Trove of childrens songs, fairy tales etc" to our newborn, to get in the practice of reading to our child. Simple rhyming stuff, 3 blind mice, the luminous dong, tom thumb, jack and the beanstalk. It was getting more serious. Then a story: man earns and travels with a reaver at his side and ends up winning the heart of a princess - who up 'til that point kept a garden decorated with the blood dripping heads of failed suitors. I mean, she was under the influence of an evil troll(iirc) so no disrespect to her but I thought I might wait a few years until I read that one to my kids...

wahern 6y ago
Grimm's Fairy Tales are already watered downed versions of the originals, edited for the benefit of softer 19th century sensibilities. Darker material gives stories gravitas as well as putting the moral lessons in starker, simpler terms. If you don't follow instructions, or exhibit some antisocial behavior, you're not just "punished", you're slaughtered. Little Red Riding Hood strayed from the path and was eaten alive by a wolf. You can't get more clear than that. If and when the hunter saves her, that's mostly for the benefit of the parent, not the kid. I'll think you'll find that most children, even from a very early age (preschool and before), are quite capable of discerning fiction from reality, and adept at distinguishing and recognizing (if not understanding) the moral lessons. The problem, IMO, with many fairy tales isn't the gore but that neither the moral lesson nor the plots resonant; so the gore just seems gratuitous rather than punctuation. Nobody is afraid of wolves anymore (we killed them all generations ago), and we rarely if ever let kids out into the world without safety rails, even up to college. The latter wouldn't matter if kids feared wolves--the graphic detail would make the moral lesson stick, which is kinda the point--but they just aren't. I think you'll also find that, especially in the U.S., we live in a ridiculously violent culture; violence that we at best only superficially disguise. It's not the guns dropping legions of "bad guys"--again, most children understand fiction--it's just... I dunno, violence as an end unto itself rather than a means...? Fairy tale gore in books is the last thing I would ever be concerned about. I've actively tried to read these sorts of stories to my kids, to add diversity to their diet, but they don't seem to ever get into it. I think maybe it's just too unbelievable and dull, not too raw. The modern world is too different, modern culture much more slick and appetizing, and they know it even at 3.
- Talanes 6y ago
  In the 90's and early 2000's, I was a child running around the desert and constantly being told how to avoid encounters with Mountain Lions, so we're not that far from those days.
- kieckerjan 6y ago
  While toning down the sexuality, the Grimms actually dialed up the violence in later editions of their work. Why? Maybe because the later editions were directed at children and had to have a didactic purpose, showcasing the (harmful, often gruesome) results of unwise decisions. Needless to say, didactic insights were quite different back then. https://eraebarnes.com/2017/10/06/from-wild-beasts-to-a-barrel-of-nails-recreating-grimms-fairytales-through-violence/ https://eraebarnes.com/2017/10/06/from-wild-beasts-to-a-barr...
- WalterBright 6y ago
  > we live in a ridiculously violent culture I am rather shocked at this sentiment. We live in an incredibly peaceful culture, in historical context. For example, people used to be hung in the town square. Burned alive for entertainment. People would wander around town with a sword, picking fights to the death, and it was legal. I once asked my dad why punishments for people who conspired against the king were so public and so hideously brutal. He replied that the people lived in brutal times, death at a young age was common, so it had to be amped up to get their attention. These days, I never even saw a dead body (outside of a mummy in a museum) until my 50s. It's incredible if you think about it.
  - wahern 6y ago
    The U.S. is exceptionally violent as compared to most other developed countries. There are many contributors to the origins of that culture--frontier mentality, slave suppression, etc--but what's left today is the violence. In middle-class society that tendency toward violence is kept in check by other cultural norms and, arguably, redirected in various ways, such as a harshly punitive penal system, suppression of underclasses, etc. But among the American working class and, especially, the poor, that violence manifests in very direct, brutal ways. My step brother travels the country working at refineries, which tend to be located in impoverished areas, and just the other day we were discussing some of the things he's seen around the country--knife fights, gun fights, and countless bar fights. My dad has more than his fair share of scars from when he traveled from town to town for work. I saw and experienced plenty of things as a child that many Americans, not to mention foreigners from less violent countries, would only expect to see in a movie. All this stuff is mostly hidden from direct view by the middle classes. But if you grew up poor or poor-adjacent, things often look quit different. In my travels and readings I've found that countries have distinct tendencies toward violence that clearly emanate from their culture, not from objective markers like poverty, income, etc. For example, in the 1990s Ecuador had the lowest homicide rate in the Americas, despite often crushing poverty. In the early 2000s there was a surge of Columbian immigrants in search of work. Columbian culture was far more violent than Ecuador's, much like the U.S. (as opposed to simply a consequence of organized crime), and rates of violence soared. Not because the Columbian immigrants were criminals, but because those who resorted to crime did so in a more violent manner. But my point wasn't to say that the U.S. is unsafe. Just that what makes a culture (and people) violent isn't superficial behaviors. Guns don't make America violent. America loves guns because we're a violent society. To be clear, we love guns not because we feel we have to defend ourselves, but we because we fetishize the idea of defending ourselves amidst our own violence. Take away the guns and homicides might drop, but the tendency toward violence will simply remain latent, and all the other manifestations of that culture of violence will remain. It doesn't mean we can't become a safer, better society. We have and we are. We'll just follow a different, often trailing path as compared to less violent societies. If we want our kids to internalize a different set of norms and expectations, it's these subtle cues that we have to watch for, not the artifice. Kids can see through artifice, at least to the extent they haven't internalized the norms the artifice reflects or disguises. They don't need to be protected from video games or gun culture or gore; they need to be taught to recognize our society's preference for conflict over cooperation, for winner-take-all strategies, rather than to let it seep in quietly. Those cues are subtle and pervasive and to some extent exist even within, e.g., Disney's otherwise saccharine world. For example, Disney's woke culture messaging (as well meaning and useful as it is) reflects the narrative of two groups pitted against each other, one right and one wrong, where the latter either needs to be vanquished or converted. Unlike in traditional fairy tales, in American narratives the boogeyman is your nextdoor neighbor, not a troll or a witch. We think we're sending sophisticated, moral, good messages, and we are, but it's not all we're sending.
mlang23 6y ago
Fairy tales need to be a bit grimm (pun intended). They are supposed to teach about hardship and the difference between good and evil. You can only show the contrast if you actually have some evil to talk about. A child dying in the flames she sparked by playing with a bunch of matches while she was home alone. The cats were trying to warn her, now they can only watch from afar as the child and house burn. A homeless child having a final hallucination while watching (again) a bunch of matches burn while freezing to death outside. Another child dying from hunger because he refuses to eat what his parents are putting on the table. Yes, not the most uplifting stories, but where I come from, everyone knows these stories, and almost everyone knows them since they are about 5.
- _carbyau_ 6y ago
  Yeah. Now I want to track down that "refuses to eat" story because we're at that picky eater stage! My feeling was that I would wait a bit longer for the more gruesome story than some of the others.
  - mlang23 6y ago
    "The Story of Augustus who not have any Soup" is the english title of "Die Geschichte vom Suppen-Kasper" as far as I was able to figure out.
colechristensen 6y ago
The world is a harsh place. If you raise children in a bubble of safety and only throw them out into the real world at adulthood, they have many problems. Scary stories are a safe way to introduce developing humans to the realities of the world so they are prepared for them. Biologically it is the likely source of a lot of mental illness. Basically your brain tunes itself towards the expectations set in its early environment, if the adult environment is quite a lot different than the childhood one, the feedback systems tuned to keep things on the level can’t cope with the foreign environment and you get mental illness. It wasn’t so long ago that wandering off into the forest would likely get you murdered or worse.
- _carbyau_ 6y ago
  The world being harsh is true. And I agree that modern western society seems to simply expect bad things not to happen. Whether it is bullying, other human-human violence or "business can't be let fail". A simple look at the animal kingdom tells you this is not a sane "expectation". In this instance, I wasn't planning to censor the story out of existence. Just perhaps wait a bit longer than the other stories would require. Interesting theory on the mental illness. I won't entirely subscribe to it as I think there are a wide variety of illnesses with a wide variety of causes. Whether this is the "likely source of a lot" remains to be proven I think.

wahern 6y ago

Grimm's Fairy Tales are already watered downed versions of the originals, edited for the benefit of softer 19th century sensibilities. Darker material gives stories gravitas as well as putting the moral lessons in starker, simpler terms. If you don't follow instructions, or exhibit some antisocial behavior, you're not just "punished", you're slaughtered. Little Red Riding Hood strayed from the path and was eaten alive by a wolf. You can't get more clear than that. If and when the hunter saves her, that's mostly for the benefit of the parent, not the kid. I'll think you'll find that most children, even from a very early age (preschool and before), are quite capable of discerning fiction from reality, and adept at distinguishing and recognizing (if not understanding) the moral lessons. The problem, IMO, with many fairy tales isn't the gore but that neither the moral lesson nor the plots resonant; so the gore just seems gratuitous rather than punctuation. Nobody is afraid of wolves anymore (we killed them all generations ago), and we rarely if ever let kids out into the world without safety rails, even up to college. The latter wouldn't matter if kids feared wolves--the graphic detail would make the moral lesson stick, which is kinda the point--but they just aren't. I think you'll also find that, especially in the U.S., we live in a ridiculously violent culture; violence that we at best only superficially disguise. It's not the guns dropping legions of "bad guys"--again, most children understand fiction--it's just... I dunno, violence as an end unto itself rather than a means...? Fairy tale gore in books is the last thing I would ever be concerned about. I've actively tried to read these sorts of stories to my kids, to add diversity to their diet, but they don't seem to ever get into it. I think maybe it's just too unbelievable and dull, not too raw. The modern world is too different, modern culture much more slick and appetizing, and they know it even at 3.

Talanes 6y ago
In the 90's and early 2000's, I was a child running around the desert and constantly being told how to avoid encounters with Mountain Lions, so we're not that far from those days.
kieckerjan 6y ago
While toning down the sexuality, the Grimms actually dialed up the violence in later editions of their work. Why? Maybe because the later editions were directed at children and had to have a didactic purpose, showcasing the (harmful, often gruesome) results of unwise decisions. Needless to say, didactic insights were quite different back then. https://eraebarnes.com/2017/10/06/from-wild-beasts-to-a-barrel-of-nails-recreating-grimms-fairytales-through-violence/ https://eraebarnes.com/2017/10/06/from-wild-beasts-to-a-barr...
WalterBright 6y ago
> we live in a ridiculously violent culture I am rather shocked at this sentiment. We live in an incredibly peaceful culture, in historical context. For example, people used to be hung in the town square. Burned alive for entertainment. People would wander around town with a sword, picking fights to the death, and it was legal. I once asked my dad why punishments for people who conspired against the king were so public and so hideously brutal. He replied that the people lived in brutal times, death at a young age was common, so it had to be amped up to get their attention. These days, I never even saw a dead body (outside of a mummy in a museum) until my 50s. It's incredible if you think about it.
- wahern 6y ago
  The U.S. is exceptionally violent as compared to most other developed countries. There are many contributors to the origins of that culture--frontier mentality, slave suppression, etc--but what's left today is the violence. In middle-class society that tendency toward violence is kept in check by other cultural norms and, arguably, redirected in various ways, such as a harshly punitive penal system, suppression of underclasses, etc. But among the American working class and, especially, the poor, that violence manifests in very direct, brutal ways. My step brother travels the country working at refineries, which tend to be located in impoverished areas, and just the other day we were discussing some of the things he's seen around the country--knife fights, gun fights, and countless bar fights. My dad has more than his fair share of scars from when he traveled from town to town for work. I saw and experienced plenty of things as a child that many Americans, not to mention foreigners from less violent countries, would only expect to see in a movie. All this stuff is mostly hidden from direct view by the middle classes. But if you grew up poor or poor-adjacent, things often look quit different. In my travels and readings I've found that countries have distinct tendencies toward violence that clearly emanate from their culture, not from objective markers like poverty, income, etc. For example, in the 1990s Ecuador had the lowest homicide rate in the Americas, despite often crushing poverty. In the early 2000s there was a surge of Columbian immigrants in search of work. Columbian culture was far more violent than Ecuador's, much like the U.S. (as opposed to simply a consequence of organized crime), and rates of violence soared. Not because the Columbian immigrants were criminals, but because those who resorted to crime did so in a more violent manner. But my point wasn't to say that the U.S. is unsafe. Just that what makes a culture (and people) violent isn't superficial behaviors. Guns don't make America violent. America loves guns because we're a violent society. To be clear, we love guns not because we feel we have to defend ourselves, but we because we fetishize the idea of defending ourselves amidst our own violence. Take away the guns and homicides might drop, but the tendency toward violence will simply remain latent, and all the other manifestations of that culture of violence will remain. It doesn't mean we can't become a safer, better society. We have and we are. We'll just follow a different, often trailing path as compared to less violent societies. If we want our kids to internalize a different set of norms and expectations, it's these subtle cues that we have to watch for, not the artifice. Kids can see through artifice, at least to the extent they haven't internalized the norms the artifice reflects or disguises. They don't need to be protected from video games or gun culture or gore; they need to be taught to recognize our society's preference for conflict over cooperation, for winner-take-all strategies, rather than to let it seep in quietly. Those cues are subtle and pervasive and to some extent exist even within, e.g., Disney's otherwise saccharine world. For example, Disney's woke culture messaging (as well meaning and useful as it is) reflects the narrative of two groups pitted against each other, one right and one wrong, where the latter either needs to be vanquished or converted. Unlike in traditional fairy tales, in American narratives the boogeyman is your nextdoor neighbor, not a troll or a witch. We think we're sending sophisticated, moral, good messages, and we are, but it's not all we're sending.

mlang23 6y ago

Fairy tales need to be a bit grimm (pun intended). They are supposed to teach about hardship and the difference between good and evil. You can only show the contrast if you actually have some evil to talk about. A child dying in the flames she sparked by playing with a bunch of matches while she was home alone. The cats were trying to warn her, now they can only watch from afar as the child and house burn. A homeless child having a final hallucination while watching (again) a bunch of matches burn while freezing to death outside. Another child dying from hunger because he refuses to eat what his parents are putting on the table. Yes, not the most uplifting stories, but where I come from, everyone knows these stories, and almost everyone knows them since they are about 5.

_carbyau_ 6y ago
Yeah. Now I want to track down that "refuses to eat" story because we're at that picky eater stage! My feeling was that I would wait a bit longer for the more gruesome story than some of the others.
- mlang23 6y ago
  "The Story of Augustus who not have any Soup" is the english title of "Die Geschichte vom Suppen-Kasper" as far as I was able to figure out.

colechristensen 6y ago

The world is a harsh place. If you raise children in a bubble of safety and only throw them out into the real world at adulthood, they have many problems. Scary stories are a safe way to introduce developing humans to the realities of the world so they are prepared for them. Biologically it is the likely source of a lot of mental illness. Basically your brain tunes itself towards the expectations set in its early environment, if the adult environment is quite a lot different than the childhood one, the feedback systems tuned to keep things on the level can’t cope with the foreign environment and you get mental illness. It wasn’t so long ago that wandering off into the forest would likely get you murdered or worse.

_carbyau_ 6y ago
The world being harsh is true. And I agree that modern western society seems to simply expect bad things not to happen. Whether it is bullying, other human-human violence or "business can't be let fail". A simple look at the animal kingdom tells you this is not a sane "expectation". In this instance, I wasn't planning to censor the story out of existence. Just perhaps wait a bit longer than the other stories would require. Interesting theory on the mental illness. I won't entirely subscribe to it as I think there are a wide variety of illnesses with a wide variety of causes. Whether this is the "likely source of a lot" remains to be proven I think.