Effects of the Fairy Tales on Children - Research Paper Example

? 21 November Effects of the Fairy Tales on Children Fairy tales have always been popular among the children. Through the fairy tales, children move from the real world into an imaginary world. Their creative skills and craving for cartoons enables them to imagine and make part of an unreal world. Although children enjoy the fairy tales, yet they are unaware of how their obsession with the fairy tale culture affects their perceptions of the life and the world. Children’s craving for the lifestyle portrayed in the fairy tales saps their ability to cope with the challenges of the real world and makes them thankless. Fairy Tales lead to disappointment with life. Fairy tales do not interpret the world in its true colors. They are way off the real world in their themes, environment and relationships between the characters. Having read the fairy tales throughout their childhood, the girls are so influenced that they started thinking of themselves like a princess. They perceive themselves to be pretty while many are actually not pretty enough. Fairy tales differentiate between people only on the basis of their richness. The rich are portrayed as members of the royal family while those who don’t belong to this family are supposedly poor. While the financial status of a family is a string basis of discrimination in the society, many other bases of discrimination are overlooked in the fairy tales. Such bases include but are not limited to age, gender, color, religion and culture. Fairy tales clearly distinguish between the good and the bad. Often, the fairies are bound to be good and the character of the witch encapsulates all the evil in the world. Thus, children start believing that what is bad is as obvious as a witch and the good is what looks good. This principle becomes too subjective in the real world in which there are plenty of double-faced characters. People who apparently look like fairies are witchlike in character while others that are not quite good looking to qualify as fairies may be nobler than the fairies themselves. Thus, children’s perception of nastiness in the world is very deceptive. This increases their susceptibility to be easily cheated upon by the evil forces in the real society. Fairy tales mostly overlook the kind of grudge that cultivates among the siblings in a lot of families. Fairy tales suggest that people belonging to one family are one and must stand united in all circumstances. Hence, believers of the fairytale culture expect their siblings to be very nice to them but they are overwhelmed with grief and confusion when the siblings fight with them. Fairy tales have played an important role in making the women desperate about their marriage as well as life after that. Fairy tales promote the view for every girl that one day, a prince would come riding on a horse from a land faraway and would take her along to the palace where she would live the life of a queen ever after. While this may seem a very delightful idea, this has very limited, if any, connection to the reality. In the wait of their charming prince, girls tend to indulge in activities that they should principally not indulge in. Many girls underestimate their parents’ ability to find that prince for them and hence start the search for him on their own. In their attempt to find the true life-partner, girls make friends with boys and try building relationships with them. Although many of such relationships are not originally intended to be very strong, yet often such relationships drive the girls too far away from their original identity and many end up becoming single parents of the children of their departed boyfriends. A vast majority of the women than do cohabiting are in search of their life-partner who can give them the comfort of the level of a prince. Associating the image of their ideal life-partner with the personality of the charming prince, women are usually too high in their expectations to bring any meaningful result to their search. The charming prince they have fancied throughout their childhood and teenage was handsome and tall, so they look for attractiveness and height in the life-partner. The charming prince had unusual physical strength and behaved like a Hercules, so anybody weaker is downright unacceptable. The charming prince was brainy and rich, so anybody who is not so rich does not fit the criteria. The search of a tall, handsome, intelligent, rich and muscular life-partner is quite fanciful. The idea is just too good to be true. Even if the girls trust their parents’ ability to find the charming prince for them, they are often disappointed after the marriage. When the girls are not able to find their charming prince in the life-partners, they get disappointed. It is the very disappointment that becomes the root-cause of a lot of divorces. The fairy tales become the cause of divorce for many for different kinds of reasons. The fairy tales define the life after marriage as the one in which there is nobody in the palace except for the bride and the bridegroom. This is not possible in the real world in a vast majority of cases. While some people do have a trend to live separate from their parents in the West after marriage, the situation is far more difficult to achieve in the East where the son is often the sole bread earner for the family and has to support not only his wife and children, but also his parents and often siblings as well. Having read the fairy tales and believing in living with nobody else in the house but the husband drives the women crazy when they find out that they have to also live with the father-in-law, the mother-in-law, the sisters-in-law and the brothers-in-law. The fair tale supports the idea of shifting from a family to an isolated place with the husband, while girls in the real world find themselves moving from one family into another. Not many women find it quite pleasing due to the immense tendency of the mothers-in-law to indulge into conflicts with them. A lot of married women leave their husbands’ home not because they are upset with the husbands, but because they cannot stand their families. Apart from this, fairy tales also provide people with other reasons to reach the divorce. The prince and the princess in the fairy tales are always honest and sincere towards each other. The prince does not adore any women more than the princess and so does the princess. With such a cognitive development, when people enter their marriage, they expect their spouse to like them above everything and everybody else in the world, which is not practicable at all. Thus, a wife does not like it when the husband appreciates the performance or adores the beauty of a TV actress in a soap. Likewise, husbands become jealous when the wife likes the looks or the body of a male actor. Although this seems too little a reason for anybody to end up in a divorce, yet unfortunately, it is a reason that has caused divorce in many cases. The inculcation of wrong concepts about the society, characters and relationships weaken the children when they find the disparity between the way the world is supposed to be and the way they find the world in reality. “When people hurt you…you have to get back up, with a faith in God not man, because God’s help doesn’t expire at midnight and with him your carriage doesn’t turn into a pumpkin” (Amanda). Fairy tales inculcate false perceptions of gender in the children which they are reluctant to change when they grow up. In the fairy tales, the princess does not have to work in the palace after marriage. She is supposed to be in the palace all day long and enjoys the company of the prince full time. The princess has no work to do but to wear the makeup, put on beautiful dresses and charm the prince with her beauty. The real life is quite different from this. The husband is supposed to go out of the home and earn the bread for the family. He cannot give company to the wife in the home all day long or the family would soon start starving. This upsets the wife and she starts to think that the husband is not giving her sufficient time. Overcome with frustration, some women develop extra-marital affairs and so do some men. On the other hand, not many wives can afford to stay at home like the princess in the fairy tale does given the excessive cost of living. The sky-high prices call for a dual working family culture. Not many women are happy to work after marriage when they have expected their husband to provide for them all life long. In addition to that, girls fancy living in homes where they would be served by the servants and maids like the princess in the fairy tales are served in the palaces. Contrary to that, when they have to do everything with their own hands, they start to think that they are being done injustice to in the house and are being treated like servants. Critics may argue that fairy tales suit the expectations and taste of the children and are an essential means of education for the children in the early years of their life. “…it is a kind of cultural development that is of vital importance to develop creativity in the youth of today” (“Japanese Children’s”). People of different ages find interest in different kinds of activities and fairy tales address the concerns of the children. Critics deem the fairy tales an efficient tool to entertain the children and make them learn the values. Concluding, children’s obsession with the fairy tale lifestyle makes them pessimistic in their approach towards the life in the real world. Fairy tales makes children keep so high hopes for their future that anything lesser makes them thankless and frustrated. In light of the points discussed in this paper, it becomes obvious that the fairy tales deceit the children and make them expect too much from the life, which leads them to disappointment in life. Works Cited: Amanda. “Life's Not A Fairy Tale...Or Is It?” n.d. Web. 21 Nov. 2011. . “Japanese Children’s Fairy Tales.” n.d. Web. 21 Nov. 2011. . Read More