“Once Upon a Time: Why We Need Stories”, Brhat, April 30, 2026
“Fairy tales seemingly occupy a paradoxical space in a child’s mind: they are fantastical and wondrous, yet at the same time deeply instructive, by being intimately concerned with teaching how to inhabit reality. To tell a child a fairy tale is to initiate them into a symbolic, culturally rich language through which the world becomes intelligible. Fairy tales contribute to the development of moral and cultural intelligence of a child, and also provide a crucial emotional grammar. A child, encountering fear, jealousy, loss, or hope within the secure confines of a story, is able to process these otherwise overwhelming emotions by identifying with the protagonist. The dark forest, the wicked stepmother, the long journey—these are not merely plot devices, but symbolic structures through which children rehearse their own emotional lives. Far from encouraging escapism, such narratives offer a controlled imaginative space in which emotions can be confronted, ordered, and ultimately resolved. This early engagement with symbolic struggle often equips individuals, later in life, with a greater capacity for emotional articulation and resilience, producing adults who are not less grounded, but more deeply adjusted to the complexities of human experience.
Yet postmodern criticism of fairy tales and myths attempts to render them obsolete in our dystopian, sanitized, tech-driven world, approaching them as narratives shaped by—and often reinforcing—older structures of power. Feminist critics, in particular, argue that many traditional tales reproduce rigid gender hierarchies: passive heroines, dominant male rescuers, and vilified older women, thereby limiting the imaginative and social possibilities available to children. From this perspective, the simplicity of these stories masks ideological work, encoding assumptions about beauty, authority, and virtue that reflect the societies in which they emerged. This has led to a proliferation of revisionist retellings that seek to subvert these patterns by granting agency to marginalized characters and complicating moral binaries. A contemporary example is Stepsisters, an upcoming Disney project that reimagines the Cinderella narrative from the perspective of the so-called “misunderstood” stepsisters. Criticism also draws attention to the violence and morbidity embedded in many tales—scenes of abandonment, cruelty, and punishment—questioning their psychological and ethical suitability for children. Yet even within this critique lies a tension, for others contend that it is precisely this darkness, when understood symbolically, that gives fairy tales their enduring depth and resonance.
Importantly, fairy tales sustain something that modernity actively erodes: our sense of wonder. They preserve an enchanted vision of the world in which meaning is layered, where the ordinary is suffused with possibility, and existence itself invites curiosity. “The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue,” Bettelheim writes — they take place in faraway lands or in the distant past when things were different. The cultivation of this sort of enchantment with the world around us is not a retreat from reality, but an enrichment of it—cultivating imagination, deepening perception, and anchoring the child (and adult) within a cultural continuum of stories that have long shaped human consciousness. In this sense, fairy tales do not merely belong to childhood; they refine it, leaving behind a residue of wonder, moral clarity, and emotional depth that continues to inform one’s engagement with the world long after the stories themselves have been “outgrown…..”
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