But they’re starting to. The revised Little Red comes amid a typhoon of concern over the effects of media violence, particularly on the psyches of the youngest kids. Last fall, in back-to-back salvos from the Clinton administration, Attorney General Janet Reno warned television executives to curb primetime blood-and-guts or risk having limits imposed; then Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders urged parents to “think twice” before buying a toy gun for a child. Now Golden Books, the nation’s largest children’s book line, has scripted tamer endings into three of its most redoubtable tales–Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Little Pigs and Chicken Little. Nearly 20 years after child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim theorized that a little fairy-tale horror is good for kids, child psychologists are questioning how much mayhem should be in their entertainment. “There’s no intrinsic value of exposing kids under 5 or 6 to death or horror or fright,” says Yale University child psychologist Jerome Singer. “They’ll find lots of it later on.”
Golden Books didn’t set out to rewrite the classics. But that’s what it did after a group of editors and artists tried to add sound effects to several “sight and sound” editions. The sounds–a wolf cackling, a stomach gurgling–were too lighthearted for the ominous images of the original tales. It prompted them to reconsider the plots. “There were a lot of things in here that would scare anyone,” says Margaret Snyder, a managing editor of Western Publishing, the Minnesota-based parent company of Golden. (The company will continue to publish original versions of all three tales.)
Should children be afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? Of course. Tales like The Juniper Tree, in which Mom is served her child’s head, and Hansel and Gretel, in which kids wind up in the oven, can terrify. But not everyone thinks night fright is bad. In his 1976 analysis of fairy tales, “The Uses of Enchantment,” Bettelheim argued that all children have rich fantasy lives, filled with fears and anxieties; wicked witches and vicious wolves aren’t about violence per se, but about coping. “Each fairy tale is a magic mirror which reflects some aspects of our inner world, and of the steps required by our evolution from immaturity to maturity,” he wrote.
Unlike violent movies, which leave no doubt about death and destruction, fairy tales play out in a child’s imagination. And most child psychologists believe children are strong enough to process the images. When a 6-year-old reads about the Big Bad Wolf, for example, he might be conjuring up a picture of the scary neighborhood dog; that, in turn, helps him face his feelings about the animal and his world. Is he afraid of the dog? Did the dog ever bite him? Or did he love the dog and feel sad when it died? Perhaps he’s feeling very small in a world in which everyone is so big. Even the grimmest story gives parents and kids a chance to talk about what’s going on in the child’s mind. “You have something to focus on–this story–as opposed to going up to a child and saying, ‘Tell me something you’re afraid of’.” says psychologist James Garbarino, president of the Erikson Institute in Chicago.
Besides, familiarity can breed content. Hearing the same tale over and over helps a child pierce his fears. So does having a grown-up nearby to soothe and to underscore the difference between fantasy and reality. The message: the child’s own world is safe and protected. “The child thinks, ‘Here Mother is telling me about these stories, and she’s so nice, she’s so protective. I can see these are things only in my head’,” says Northwestern University psychiatrist David Zinn.
If unexpurgated fairy tales are so hearty, why feed kids literature lite? “Kids beyond the age of 6, 7, 8, 9 can read the endings in a different way and [understand] more of the violence,” says Singer of Yale. “There is no advantage to confronting kids early on to negative things.” Singer believes that seenrity, not gore, helps children learn to cope with adversity later on. But shielding them from reality may be worse, say other psychologists and authors. “Try to imagine how frightening it is for a child to comprehend the disheveled world we live in,” says Maurice Sendak, who has written some of the grittiest tales in modern children’s literature. “We don’t help them by lying and censoring books. We help them by telling the truth and supporting them.” (Sendak does his part: his new book, “We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy,” is a nursery rhyme about homelessness.)
Besides, fairy tales have been evolving for centuries. Storytellers traditionally recited them to adults, not just children, and in the Victorian era, grownups actually “wanted to scare the hell out of kids so they’d do the right thing,” says Jack Zipes, author of “The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood” and other fairy-tale histories. It wasn’t until the 1900s, when fairy tales moved from adult narrative to kids’ books, that people started sanitizing them. Even morals changed. In the 1830s, the lesson of Little Red Riding Hood was “Obey your mother.” Now it’s “Don’t talk to strangers.” More recently, fairy tales have become P.C.–feminist, racially sensitive and culturally correct.
But even the most carefully constructed fairy tales can’t stop a bullet. Or erase bias or bigotry. The real question is whether softer prose is just more hand-wringing from parents and leaders at a loss over how to protect their children. “It’s easy to change the ending of a fairy tale or decide not to buy toy guns,” says Rosalie Streett, executive director of Parent Action, a Baltimorebased national organization of parents. “It’s much harder to deal with the real social issues that cause violence.” Until grownups do, it will be hard for kids to live happily ever after.
