PARENTS are no longer reading their kids traditional fairy stories as they believe them to be too scary.
A new survey has revealed one in five American parents has stopped reading the classics.
A third said children had actually been left in tears after hearing the gruesome tale of Little Red Riding Hood.
Meanwhile nearly half of parents refused to read Rumpelstiltskin (pictured here) due to its theme of kidnapping.
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Eloise Horsfield
What a load of namby-pamby rubbish. Do they want their kids to grow up with absolutely no imagination. I can’t imagine childhood without the stories that were read to me or the ones I read a little later on such as Cinderella, Rumpelstiltskin, The Children of the New Forest, Heidi and the books of Edin Blyton (in their original format).
Sorry Enid Blyton – just a little typo there.
Actually, this is nothing new. Parents, psychologists and child development experts have been debating this subject for more than half a century. Many younger children (under 5) will actually inform their parents that they find some of these stories too frightening and don’t want to hear them. I vividly remember plugging my ears at the age of four whenever someone tried to read Sleeping Beauty to me.
Hi Mona, the one thing I was terrified of was Dr Who and his Daleks which, during the 60’s, was shown on BBC at around teatime on a Saturday. I can remember watching the tv from the kitchen through the ‘hatch’ as my mother stood ironing. I still don’t like Dr Who or anything remotely scifi.
As I recall my favourite books from childhood were the original ‘Heidi’ by Joanna Spyre followed by the two sequels ‘Heidi Grows Up’ and ‘Heidi’s Children’ written by Charles Tritton and also ‘The Silver Skates’ by Hans Brinker, my aunt sent this one to me one Christmas from Australia and last but not least ‘The Children at Red Roofs’ by Enid Blyton. Two of my children were voracious readers, one, at almost 22, still is. The other is very specific in his likes. The third (actually the oldest) has Down’s Syndrome and it has always been a great sorrow to me that he cannot derive the pleasure from a book that the rest of the household does. However, he can act his way though the whole of Disney’s fairy tale catalogue along with High School Musical and many others.