The Use of Fear in Children's Bed Stories

It is well known that the Grimm’s fairy tales are extremely scary and violent for children. Due to the modern overprotective paediatric psychology, parents are over concerned for their children and they provide them mindless stories with bad art and no good storyline. Modern parents don’t want their kids to be acquainted with horrific stories that might frighten them.

The main purpose of this essay is to show the use of fear, in the Grimm’s fairy tales, in order to educate, prevent and control children during the eighteen and nineteen centuries in Europe. It is also intended to explain the cultural and psychological reasons for this phenomenon.

Art, especially literature, reflects the sociological conditions that exist during a certain period of history. These conditions may be strongly influenced by war, poverty, epidemics, religion, politics and many other factors that shape the way people conceive their reality. Morals and psychology also change with time, and these changes directly affect the way in which parents and adults educate children. During the eighteen and nineteen centuries in Europe, children were important assets to their parents and grandparents because they took care of them when they were old. Also, children represented an opportunity for their family to marry a wealthier one in order to have a higher economical position. This means that parents had the need to control their children so that they did not loose their assets.

In many of the Grimm’s brothers fairy tales we can observe this pattern; parents forced their beautiful and kind daughters to marry a rich man, even though he was evil, just to get an economical advantage of the marriage. It was extremely important for parents to control their daughters to prevent an unwanted and inconvenient pregnancy that would ruin the parent’s marriage arrangements. Another common pattern, in Grimm’s fairy tales, that reflects a sociological problem of that time, is the constant jealousy between young stepmothers and their daughters. It is a fact that during those periods of history, plenty women died from childbirth and there were many instances in where the father remarried a young woman close in age to the father’s eldest daughter.

The Grimm brother’s tales, and others from different authors, had the intention of educating children or at least warn them or give them a lesson. Since in these centuries psychological theories nowadays used to raise children in a “healthy” way were still not invented, children were treated as little assets waiting to be used. Society of those times was not concerned about the correct way to raise a child, because it was not needed at the time. Fear is one of the most popular tools to manipulate and control people, especially kids due to their credibility and ignorance. In order to prevent children from running away from home, the tales would warn them about the dangers and the evil that ruled the forest so that children would get scared of doing it. To warn kids about spoiled behaviour with the adults, the Grimm’s tales would show them terrifying stories about evil children who later suffered from harsh punishments due to their bad behaviour. It is important to remark that this book of tales would also use fear to control the youth, for example, in many of it’s stories it talks about the terrible acts that stepmothers would do to their stepdaughters. In the other hand, we can see how the tales warn young girls from having “merry times” with men so that they did not get pregnant.

Tales in previous centuries were more dark, creepy and violent but they were more challenging. Nowadays society tends to overprotect and coddle everybody, especially children. We can see this within Disney’s movies and all of the TV shows for children, all of them show kids a poor written storyline with a happy ending. Adults don’t want children to be exposed to violence and they pretend to teach kids that everybody gets through life unscathed. It is a fact that parents are also loosing their authority to raise their children and they are becoming less strict with them in order to “prevent” them from suffering. According to the American psychologist John Gray, “children tend to self-destruct in response to fear-based parenting”. This author is just one of many modern psychologists who believe that fear within parenting ought to be avoided, obviously for these authors tales such as Grimm’s brother’s are not correct for children because of their excessive use of fear. According to author Fiona Veitch Smith, a good children’s book is the one that has an interesting plot, it’s original, well written, has quality illustrations and it has the exact amount of preachiness. Veitch’s statement leaves us clear how modern children’s book are written nowadays, and it is clear that they are very different to the way Grimm’s brothers tales were written.

As a consequence of the actual problems in the world, society has different concerns with the education of children such as racial tolerance and sexual orientation, to name the most popular ones so it is normal that the concerns of the parents are different from the ones of parents from the eighteen and nineteen centuries. Due to the diverse changes in society, the conception of reality has changed and with the consolidation of psychology we can now understand these changes better. Within the past 10 years, overprotecting parenting has become more common and popular in society. Modern parents will find every possible excuse to ban violence and horror from their children’s life, for example Grimm’s tales, and fill their heads with unrealistic and poorly written stories with happy endings. It is becoming more common to find exaggerated moral lessons in children’s movies, TV shows and literature as a result of this overprotective parenting.

Modern psychology may have good reasons to avoid using fear to control children as the Grimm’s tales did; maybe they are trying to prevent psychological consequences in the healthy development of children. However what if Grimm’s stories were more effective with children than the modern tales? I strongly believe that there is a misunderstanding with the use of fear; we have the wrong concept of it. If well used, it can be an encouraging tool to challenge children, and grown ups, to go further and to be courageous and fight against evil. It is better to use fear to control children, so that they are warned about the dangers that exist in life, instead of dumbing down everything for them and making them believe that danger and suffering do not exist.

References:

Gray, J.. (2012). Children are from Heaven. May 26th, 2015, de Mars Venus Sitio web: http://www.marsvenus.com/

Hileman, S. (August 22, 2012). Hansel and Gretel—The Fairy Tale School of Fear and Violence. Crisis Magazine.

Flood, A.. (2012). Grimm brothers’ fairytales have blood and horror restored in new translation. The Guardian.

Veitch, F.. (2007). What makes a good children’s book?. Writing for Children, www.thecraftywirtter.com.