Should we sanitise the stories we tell our children?

Every once in a while someone brings up the subject of what we should teach our children. Should we or should we not sanitise the stories young children are told? Whenever this dragon of doubt rears its head, psychologists, writers, publishers, parents and teachers and everyone else gets into the fray.

Views pour in from all sides and you and I take another look at the stories we tell our children, the nursery rhymes they recite, the programmes they watch on television — or if our children are grown up, we question ourselves about everything we did that could account for the path they take today.

Some of us wish to censor the ‘violence’ of cartoon shows, forgetting the fun of the careening chase, the magical music, and (usually) the final victory of the underdog that raises a laugh and makes the young, who know they are small and at a disadvantage in a world where everyone looms over them, feel good about themselves.

Others fixate on the grim portrayal of parents and step-parents in fairy tales like Hansel and Gretel and The Wild Swans, or the finales of nursery rhymes like Jack and Jill, Humpty Dumpty or Little Miss Muffet and wish to be politically or environmentally correct.

Looking back on some of the reactions of my toddler, these arguments seem reasonable; and I distinctly recall helping The Gingerbread Man to find his way to freedom — intact — and choosing a tame ‘happily-ever-after’ for Red Riding Hood, her grandmother AND the wolf, who looked too much like our beloved German shepherd to deserve the version that included his stomach being ripped open!

In other stories, however, a bit of blood and gore was permitted by our tyrannical toddler because the “...and they lived happily ever after” was reached quickly and decisively, without lingering on the means to that end!

Now, many years after all this sugar coating I’d done without much thought to the consequences on the psyche, along comes the thesis: “Tell it like it is — there is no happily ever after!” and everyone is up in arms all over again.

Let children know that life is not a bed of roses or a safe spot on the throne with Prince Charming at your side. Discard the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, and while you’re about it, all other happily-ever-afters so that children get used to the vicissitudes of life long before they get to know that such a word exists!

Why kill the hope with a bucketful of real life, I wonder. Couldn’t we adults do with a ‘happily ever after’ to look forward to — preferably in this life and not in the Elysian Fields? Don’t we have our own make-believe worlds, those eternally entertaining rom-coms, and aren’t we guilty of clinging to a firm belief, even if ample evidence to the contrary stares us in the face, that the guy will get the girl?

And don’t we go gaga over love songs, bawl our lungs out with the best of them, wishing the heartbreaking lyrics weren’t true and the others were?

Don’t we wake up every morning with our own little hopes? That today will be better, that at long last we will get complimented for the curry in which we have added those secret ingredients of love and experience, that we will get a hug that we have not earned, or we will at last be told that we are ‘wonderful tonight’...

So why burst the bubble for someone else?

Yes, sanitise stories for children when there is a need to. But remove the sugar coating and you may find that you and they lose out on that major ingredient of enjoyment — hope.

The writer is a journalist based in India.