Albert Einstein is supposed to have said, "If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales."
There are no grey areas in a fairy tale. Good and evil are split completely, usually with a satisfying (or bittersweet) happily ever after ending.
Books were a luxury in the house when we were growing up, but we had this set of old Anderson's and Grimm's fairy tales. They eventually fell to pieces, but years ago I found the same editions at a used book store and bought them out of nostalgia.
From the 1945 edition of Andersen's Fairly Tales, illustrated by the creepy artist Arthur Szyk, back in the Dark Ages when pictures could engross kids for hours.
Before Dave and I could read, our sister Marji would dramatically read the stories aloud until we knew them by heart. Each one had a grim lesson about what happens to selfish, bad people and vain disobedient children.
Pride was the greatest sin of all. A little girl who dares to dance into church in her new red shoes eventually gets her feet chopped off. And was grateful for it. That sort of cheery thing...and don't even ask what happened to "The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf" to avoid soiling her shoes.
Could I bring myself to read stories like that to Nova and Maya? Perhaps we shelter kids too much these days.
The Grimm brothers wrote many amoral stories, "Hansel and Gretel" for example. Some of these stories were believed to be jabs at the government or royalty at the time. But always, fairy tales are about the fight between good and evil, love and loss, and whatever you want to say about fairy tales, these lessons rub off.
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