Summary Of Young People's Mental Health By Steven Walker

In the article "Young people's mental health: the spiritual power of fairy stories, myths and legends" Steven Walker correlates the main ideas and concepts on fairy tales to the building of healthy physiological children and young adults. He starts the article off by telling the story of the Greek legend of Oedipus that where a King and his wife are prophesized as having a child that will grow up and kill his father and marry his mother. In an effort to derail the prophecy they pierce the child's feet and leave him in the mountains to die and he is saved by peasants where he then finds his way into the royal family and receives the same prophecy and it attempts to prove the prophesy wrong he runs away and ends up killing a man, who is later
He, in turn, blinds himself and his mother commits suicide. He uses this story to introduce the main topic of using myths, fairy tales and legends as a gateway to battling physiological issues that stem from childhood development. He then goes into detail how children and young adults are hard to treat because they are either too young or too old. Too young in a sense that they cannot adequately describe how they feel because they do not really know how to word everything that they feel on a daily basis and too old in a sense that dealing with older children who have been silent for so many years about what is ailing them they have used this to thus forth cope with what they are feeling and being creatures of habit it is hard to break down a wall that has been there for a while. The rest of the article goes into detail about the further synopsis of how stories are an underrated form of therapy that should be greatly influenced by further physiological practices of children and young
Walker correlates the fact that most stories are told at bedtime to give an explanation that stories are a bit like dreams. With younger children this example seems to indicate that children are able to relay a story to the dream world and thus keep their sense of wonderment alive and thriving. This something that I would have to disagree with Walker on. Just because you preach stories of happiness, wonderment, and good overcoming evil does not mean that it is happening. In that since you have to think is that what is harming the children because they are wrapped up in the thought that as long as they are good and what is right them will always come out victorious. This to me does more damage than good because you are then providing children with a false sense of hope that can be linked to the world that is outside of your home. You can hope that things happen this way but in reality, things do no go in this way so with that being said how do fairy tales and myths deal with the concepts of the real world by illustrating something that would not happen in the real world. To me, this aspect of the article is like telling your kids that Santa exists and then they find out that later on you, the parent, have been