Children's tales and teaching a child morals. By Owen Welsh

(Frankenpooh was much beloved by younger me)

After reading some of the Canterbury Tales in class, it got me thinking about more childish end of spectrum like fairy-tales, and how they continue to influence our children today. It's a widely accepted fact that how you treat a child in their early years affects them for the rest of their life, you can change the entire way a child thinks with as little as a misplaced comment or by knocking down an aspiration accidentally. Most parents in the Western world try to introduce children to stories when they're very young, to try to teach their children basic phonetics and pronunciations as well as giving them a basic set of morals to base their decisions off of. But does this really lead to a child being more morally correct in later age? It's not my place to decide for all people but there so far hasn't been a storybook that stuck with me throughout my entire life up to this point, let alone any life lessons I may have learned from them. This isn't to say I have no favorite fairy-tales, but I don't think a children's book has had any impact on me beyond "Oh that was pretty funny." But some people insist that there's some 'knack' to parenting that makes a child into an instant success. Who can really say that their rendition of Horton Hears A Who was what made little their little Alexei into some sort of musical genius?

Contrary to everything I just said, I do believe reading is important to people of all ages, the teaching of lessons and being able to look at situations from other people's viewpoints is what has led humanity to the golden age it is in today. This does raise the question of how were the great people of the previous ages raised, how did people like Boudicca, who led a hugely popular and near successful rebellion, do great things if all they were taught as a child was to obey? It's obvious that not all of a child's intellect comes from the books read to them, but what if they weren't read to at all? It was not until around the 1970's that reading to children became more regular, but you cannot argue with the fact that the world is getting smarter every day, so that could be down to exposing children to more advanced books from an earlier age. There's no real way to tell, as we could also attribute the rising intellect of children to a progressive school system or the fact that more people go to school than ever before. All in all, I can't say for certain whether reading to a child will help them become more literate or not, but one thing is for certain, children always have and always will be susceptible to outside influences which mainly involve parents.