Why parents sometimes need to alter fairy tales for the greater good of the child

This is just one aspect of a broader plethora of issues with the most enduring fairy tales that still succeed in hooking kids in. Despite the many problems with these stories, the result is the same: sometimes parents need to alter them for the greater good of the child.  In a world which increasingly recognises the anachronisms and inequalities of monarchy, it is striking how many kids' stories and movies continue to rely on royal tropes. 

Beyond this, the issue of archaic stereotyping of certain groups of people continues to be an ongoing challenge for publishers of legacy titles such as Hergé’s Tintin and the works of Enid Blyton.  These combined issues have led me to regularly change stories when I’m reading to my kids. I omit key scenes and even change the background of certain characters. I am well aware that this will seem unnecessary and, God forbid, ‘woke’ to many readers.  “They’re just stories!”  “Let the wolf eat Granny!”  

Once we get beyond these unhelpful judgements, I think we can begin to understand that the material kids read matters.  Let me offer a really simple example of how I alter a typical tale during the story before bedtime.

 In our house, we love Richard Scarry’s classic 1960s illustrated books about various animals and their exploits. Despite their brilliance, Scarry insists in all his books that the pig characters eat sausages. Like a weird cannibalistic odyssey, Mr. Piggy and Mrs. Piggy happily munch away on their own brethren during family picnics.

 I find myself explaining to my girls that this is actually not sausage at all, but some other magic sausage-shaped, pork-free alternative. The truth is just too grotesque. Kids are logical. If pigs eat pig sausages then do humans eat human sausages? Let’s not go there.  

There are two classic fairy tales whose endings I always exclude when reading to my two daughters: Hansel and Gretel and The Gingerbread Man. Both stories end with abrupt and violent death. Gretel, cognisant of her own impending demise, takes her opportunity and shoves the witch into the oven, immolating her. The story ends with an elderly woman burning to death. 

I simply cannot find a way to tell this part of the story to a three-year-old child without it being immensely upsetting. Equally, The Gingerbread Man ends with the wolf gorging on our protagonist. It is sudden, brutal and leaves the reader bereft.  

Perhaps a more egregious trope that I find myself constantly meddling with is the insistence on the benevolence of monarchy in kids’ fairy tales. Royal figures are portrayed as aspirational, heroic, beautiful. In Charles Perrot’s 1697 version of Cinderella, which now forms the basis of most editions of the story, the Prince rampages through the city trying the glass slipper on any woman he sees, in the vainglorious assumption that he can marry whomever the shoe fits. 

The arrogance of monarchy shines through but is rarely questioned in these stories.  Despite the fact that many of us have an aversion to the idea of contemporary monarchy, a lot of our girls pretend to be princesses or play dress up with little tiaras. I watch this unfolding and wonder how this has happened. We live in a republic, so why are so many kids finding this aspirational? It all comes back to fairy tales and how these characters are portrayed. 

Disney has done more to preserve the idea of monarchy in the 20th and 21st centuries than any Golden Jubilee or Trooping the Colour could ever do.  Royalty is consistently equated with beauty in kids' stories. Snow White is described as having “lips red as the rose, hair black as ebony, skin white as snow.” In Rapunzel, the eponymous character, beautiful and blonde, is saved by a prince.

 Snow White herself is also depicted as a damsel in distress, brought back to life by a ‘charming prince’. If young readers are constantly bombarded with the idea that the royals are beautiful, strong and brave then it is inevitable that they become role models for them.

The problem is this: I don’t want princes and princesses to be my children’s role models. The whole notion of monarchy represents the antithesis of the values I wish to impart. But of course, these values quickly crumble when those big innocent eyes ask for yet another screening of Frozen.   

Academics Lori Baker-Sperry and Sociology professor Liz Grauerholz have studied what they describe as the ‘feminine beauty ideal’ in fairy tales and they found that there are “approximately five times more references to women’s beauty per tale than men’s handsomeness”. 

The portrayal of girls and women in many fairy tales is simply outdated and doesn’t adhere to contemporary values of equality.  In my own telling of the Cinderella narrative, the prince isn’t a prince at all, but a regular layperson who happens to own a massive gaff through his own hard work, rather than royal privilege. A socialist interpretation of Cinderella? Yep, I’ll take that.

Others will argue that I am needlessly sanitising traditional children’s literature. I don’t agree. There are certain books that most people wouldn’t dream of showing to their kids nowadays, titles that were once considered acceptable. The Three Golliwogs, Enid Blyton’s 1944 book, fits this description. So, if we collectively decide that a title like this isn’t okay anymore then it is fair to examine the appropriateness of any book, surely?  The British publisher Egmont has taken an intriguing approach to their publication of Hergé’s Tintin. I recently bought a copy of Tintin in the Congo, his problematic and hyper-colonial escapade in Africa. I discovered that the latest edition comes with a note warning readers of this. 

It reads, “In his portrayal of the Belgian Congo, the young Hergé reflects the colonial attitudes of the time... he depicted the African people according to the bourgeois, paternalistic stereotypes of the period - an interpretation that some of today's readers may find anachronistic”. This offering of important cultural context is a possible solution to controversial legacy titles. 

 Literary revisionism is simply part of a broader and ongoing critical assessment of the books we read and the works we hand down to the next generation. But it’s not just publishers who have to make retrospective decisions about their books, its parents too.