> Regardless, the article's claim that fairy tales of beautiful women make little girls insecure is only true in the context of an unsupportive home. Until a certain age, children believe what they are told about how smart they are, how talented they are, and how handsome or pretty they are. If fairy tales do anything at all to foster insecurity, it's going to be to reinforce what the children's home lives have already instilled.

That's an interesting point. Fairy tales may keep coming back to beauty, I can see that's probably true. I can't see how they tell little girls, "This is beautiful and you're not it."

I guess there are sometimes descriptions given of the beautiful heroines. Snow White for example is described as having hair black as ebony, lips red as blood, skin white as snow. The Snow White story breaks the whole "Ugly is evil" rule though since the queen was second in line for fairest in the land. This is not the point I want to make.

I would take it a step further. It's possible that fairy tales, making a link between beauty and goodness, have exactly the opposite effect than what the article claims. Unless there's something else wrong, children should believe themselves to be both beautiful and relatively good, as Sam pointed out. Furthermore, they should identify with the heroine of the story. If anything, this should reinforce their image of themselves as good and beautiful. There is certainly no reason to say that fairy tales will destroy children's self esteem.

It is possible that such stories may give children a distorted view of what's important, in a sense placing beauty above goodness. Similarly they may encourage children to judge other people by their appearance.

But of course, fairy tales are never the only influence on children.

Hmm. I should dig out my book of fairy tales.

Rivikah