Fairytales

The Effect of Fairy Tales in a Child’s Life In the essay “The Uses of Enchantment,” Bruno Bettelheim expresses the idea that fairy tales display the struggles of life in the simplest ways, in which there is generally a humble hero who triumphs over an evil villain. By clearly presenting the hero and the villain, children are able to easily comprehend the essential idea of good and evil, but also adopt valuable character traits that the hero possesses, such as perseverance and positivity. Bettelheim also supports the idea that if one continues to persevere throughout life, they will have a happy and fulfilling existence as opposed to living a dreadful life by succumbing to fear or evil. Bettelheim’s concepts and ideas seem to be credible because fairy tales have shown to have a positive effect on children’s sense of morality. I learned from comic books, which feature characters and situations similar to those in fairy tales, to be humble, to make good choices, to decide what is right wrong from wrong, and to persevere. Most of the time in comic books the hero is very humble which teaches children to not be arrogant and to display similarities to the heroes they see or read about. For example, the hero Spiderman knew that with his incredible power he could do great things. It wasn’t until his grandfather told him that “with great power comes great responsibility” that Spiderman realized that he cannot be arrogant because that would be irresponsible. Spiderman knew that he had to remain humble and responsible in order to prevail in life. I can recall a situation in my life where being humble helped me. Back in middle school I received A’s in every one of my classes and I wanted to run for class president as well. Even though I was very successful academically, I never bragged about my intelligence and therefore my peers respected me for that and elected me for class president. The cocky guy I was running up against was completely shocked because he