Fairy Tales in Child Reading

Don’t get me wrong, I do like fairy tales — but they give children, especially girls, the wrong idea of how they should act and what life is like. Some of these are Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and Rapunzel, but some books that we read as we get older, like Harry Potter, have girls who can get things done — like Hermione Granger, who is so smart and resilient. Books we read as a kid tend to be ingrained in our minds, so when girls see these beautiful, picture perfect looking princesses they think that they need to look like that too.

I think girls need to be exposed to books or even fairy tales that show the female actually doing something instead of sitting at home moping. When only reading fairy tales, girls see their role models not doing anything about their own situations. Cinderella could have started a business and made money to buy a dress to get to the ball, but instead she waited for her fairy godmother to get her to the prince.

That brings me to another problem with fairy tales: marriage is the ultimate goal! Some people are perfectly happy not getting married and they still have a great life. Also, the marriage isn’t a good one. Aside from Rapunzel, the boy and the girl spend about one week together before they get married. That isn’t healthy!

Fairy tales also depict the mother or other girls in the book as mean and cruel, which just isn’t true. This weakens a girl’s bond with her mother, which she will need as she gets older. This same mother daughter relationship shows the stepmother being ugly, mean and deathly jealous of the protagonist’s beauty. The stepmother is always the bad guy. Do you ever see a handsome prince being the bad guy? No, no you do not. This will cause girls to lean on male relationships more than friendship and most likely have no one for support outside of her family. It also teaches them that they cannot trust other women because they will try to ruin their happily ever afters.

But my biggest problem with fairy tales is the all-around sexism of guys being better, stronger, and more resilient than girls. In all fairy tales, men go out and kill giants and ogres while girls stay at home, sweep, cook, or get bullied by stepmothers. When girls go out, they get lost in the woods and boys go and save them from wild beasts. Girls will go on to believe that they need a boy to save them, to help them, to do everything for them. I want the girls to think they can do anything, especially when we have worked so hard in areas such as sports to get where we are. I believe girls are as hardworking as guys, that we are strong and smart and sophisticated. Fairy tales don’t show that. The idea that girls can’t do anything is purely medieval, and if we want to move on from that we need to stop telling that to our children.

So please stop reading your child fairy tales. They promote sexist stereotypes. There should be fairy tales about girls being competent and saving themselves instead of crying at a fireplace. But there aren’t so the next best thing is to give your child a more diverse reading selection. Children don’t deserve a story about a helpless little girl, her ugly mother and a handsome prince to save her because that’s just not what happens in real life. I want girls to feel they can do anything and I hope you do too.