Into the Woods of the Mind
Telling children fairy tales in a digital world
By Adam Gidwitz
Once upon a time, fairy tales were king.
Before mass media, families sat around the hearth after work was done and dinner was cleared, and the readiest entertainment was the strange folk tales that were passed around the countryside, evolving with each telling. Tales that were meant to engage not just the kids, but everyone—Mom, Dad, Grandma, weird Uncle Rick. From Germany to Vietnam, folk tales functioned this way—because every culture has its weird Uncle Rick.
Even the fairy tale renaissance of the 20th Century, ushered in by Walt Disney and given teeth by the likes of Maurice Sendak and Stephen Sondheim, feels like a long time ago.
Now a child is much more likely to be entertained by the carefully crafted addictive inanity of CocoMelon than fairy tales (did you know that even the lullaby videos from CocoMelon never end with the main character falling asleep, lest the child viewer be so inspired and turn off her device?). And increasingly, even the horror that is CocoMelon has been replaced by a more gratuitous and meaningless sequel: the randomized AI slop that the YouTube algorithm mashes into children’s faces: quick cuts of gonzo imagery with no meaning at all, scrambling their young brains like eggs on a skillet.
But those weird old fairy tales—are they really any better? There have been earnest and well-reasoned objections to them for as long as they’ve been told. For good reason: many of them are bloody, gory, so strange as to feel random. They depict incest and infanticide and infidelity and every other triggering, taboo subject you can imagine.
A Bramble of Thorns
I have heard all the objections to these tales, because I tell them for a living. My first novel, A Tale Dark & Grimm, weaves a handful of lesser-known Grimm tales into a novel about two children whose parents cut off their heads (and then put them back on), prompting the de- and re-capitated children to run away in search of new parents who won’t kill them. On my podcast Grimm, Grimmer, Grimmest I adapt many of the strangest (and grimmest) fairy tales and tell them live, to children.
Not everyone is pleased with what I do. My first radio interview was with an NPR affiliate in southern Oregon. After an excellent conversation with the host about A Tale Dark & Grimm, the phone lines opened up, and the first caller announced that he loved listening to this show, and loved calling up to congratulate authors, especially debut authors. I was about to say, “Thank you,” but I didn’t get a chance—because he continued, “But you, sir, are a disgrace. You are damaging children’s amygdalas.” (He pronounced it a-myg-DAL-as, but even if he’d pronounced it right I wouldn’t have known what he was talking about).
Another time, I was flown from my home in Brooklyn to southern Ohio only to be barred from entering the school that invited me, once the administration read the content of my books.
I have been dragged in front of a principal at 7:30 a.m. (I thought my days of this were over!) to justify myself to irate parents before a school visit in Connecticut. After I apologized to the parents for upsetting their child, the father said, “Upset him? It’s his favorite book!” At which point I really resented missing my breakfast.
But perhaps my favorite objection to grim fairy tales came in the form of a question from a child during a school presentation: “Why do you tell such messed-up stories?”
Child, I am so glad you asked.
I tell messed-up stories because all of these scary, grim, bloody tales all happened. To me.
That’s what I said to that kid, anyway. To which she responded, “Your parents cut off your head?”
I said, “Yeah. You want to see the scar?” And I leaned down and pulled my sweater away from my neck.
Her eyes grew wide and she leaned in …
The Wise Ones
My exposure to the deeper meanings of fairy tales began during my senior year of high school, when I played Cinderella’s prince in Into the Woods. An enlightened English teacher introduced the cast members to Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment. This was a big moment for me. To this day, my professional guiding light is Bettelheim’s argument that fairy tales “speak about severe inner pressures in a way that the child unconsciously understands, and—without belittling the most serious inner struggles which growing up entails—offer examples of both temporary and permanent solutions to pressing difficulties.” The Uses of Enchantment has probably influenced me more than any other book, so forgive me for quoting the introduction at length:
Just because his life is often bewildering to him, the child needs even more to be given the chance to understand himself in this complex world with which he must learn to cope. To be able to do so, the child must be helped to make some coherent sense out of the turmoil of his feelings. He needs ideas on how to bring his inner house into order …
Through the centuries (if not millennia) during which, in their retelling, fairy tales became ever more refined, they came to convey at the same time overt and covert meanings—came to speak simultaneously to all levels of the human personality, communicating in a manner which reaches the uneducated mind of the child as well as that of the sophisticated adult.
These tales, according to Bettelheim, dramatize unconscious pressures using images that help the child “structure his daydreams and with them give better direction to his life.”
Another argument in defense of the value of fairy tales comes from a writer who could hardly be more different: the Catholic conservative—and Freud-hater—G. K. Chesterton. While Chesterton and Bettelheim would likely have had no time for one another had they met, Chesterton’s “The Dragon’s Grandmother” (1909) is a charmingly commonsensical ally to Bettelheim’s elevated analysis:
I had just finished looking through a pile of contemporary fiction. ... As a natural consequence … when I saw Grimm’s Fairy Tales lying accidentally on the table, I gave a cry of indecent joy. Here at least, here at last, one could find a little common sense. I opened the book, and my eyes fell on these splendid and satisfying words, “The Dragon’s Grandmother.” That at least was reasonable; that at least was true. “The Dragon’s Grandmother!”
But Chesterton is barged in upon by a “long-necked idealist” soliciting donations who, upon seeing the volume of Grimm, announces that children should not read fairy tales. Chesterton becomes apoplectic, and after likening the idealist’s anti–fairy tale position to a belief in slavery (Chesterton might not mean this quite literally), explains the value of fairy tales this way:
Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wild and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of the fairy tale is—what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The problem of the modern novel is—what will a madman do with a dull world? … these wise old tales made the hero ordinary and the tale extraordinary.
In a sense, Chesterton and Bettelheim take diametrically opposing views of the value of fairy tales. Bettelheim says that they help a child navigate internal pressures, while Chesterton claims that the maladaptation is not within the subject, but in the world.
I say, why should we choose? The world is undeniably nuts, and anyone who does not see both its cruel irrationality as well as its marvels is not looking very closely. And the vast majority of children are undeniably sane, yet are dealing with minds that are growing and changing and aren’t yet well-adapted to this nutso world. Honestly, whose mind is?
Into the Woods, into the Classroom
These are the foundational sources I build my gingerbread houses on. And inside these houses, the world presents all sorts of marvels and terrors.
I tell stories about parents who use their power over their children arbitrarily and unfairly, such as the delightful Grimm tale “Hans My Hedgehog,” in which a half-boy, half-hedgehog gets expelled from his home when his father doesn’t like the sound of the bagpipes that the father himself bought for Hans. This piques my young listeners’ anger (you can hear it for yourself). But they were most piqued when, later, a king offers to let Hans marry his daughter for the favor of showing the king the way out of the forest. I asked the kids, “Is that a fair thing for a father to do, to say ‘You can marry my daughter even though she’s never met you and you’re a weird half-hedgehog, half-dude?’” The kids all replied in the negative—except for one. A boy said, “Yeah, it’s fair! For the king!” But a girl in the group objected, “She gets to decide whether she marries him or not!” So I asked the boy, “If your mom came home and said, ‘Meet this person, you’re going to marry her,’ what would you say?” He gasped, “Noooo!” “So it sounds like that wouldn’t be fair for a father to do to a daughter!” And he said, “Ohhhhh.” (This sounds too good to be true, but it’s all there on tape; go listen!) Our children may be lugging around the baggage of our patriarchal society even without realizing it, but as both Chesterton and Bettelheim argue, children are good and sane and can bring their house into order if they have the right stories to help them do so.
I try to help children process sibling rivalry in such tales as “No Eyes, One Eye, Two Eyes, Three Eyes,” a bonkers fairy tale originally written down by the Brothers Grimm, and in “The Secret Language,” my adaptation of a tale transcribed by Bavarian folklore collector Franz Xaver von Schönwerth. In the latter, three sisters have a secret language that they use to exclude their little brother; when they’re kidnapped by an evil witch, he comes to rescue them—but is only able to when they admit him to the mysteries of their secret code.
One of the most psychologically complex tales, I think, is the one that started the whole 20th-century fairy tale craze in the United States: “Snow White.” Ostensibly a story about a mother’s jealousy of her daughter, “Snow White” is, in my view, just as much about a daughter’s jealousy of her mother. For while there is plenty of jealousy that is directed from mothers to their young and beautiful daughters, I would argue that there is at least as much going in the other direction—and at the age when “Snow White” is most consumed by children, that jealousy is dominant. For how many mothers are really jealous of their four-, five-, and six-year-olds? But how many little girls wish they could wear the beautiful clothes and jewelry that their mothers do? How many wish they could go out at night and come home as late as they want? How many wish they could spend unlimited private time with their fathers? How many wish they could be the boss? And so how satisfying must it be for a child to hear this story and think, “Oh, I’m not jealous of her! She’s jealous of me! And I will triumph over her!” And this dynamic is not just for little girls. I tell “Snow White” live to first-graders in classrooms and to seventh-graders forced to sit on the dirty floors of cafeterias, and no matter the setting or the audience, the kids are transfixed.
If “Snow White” is a particularly Bettelheimian tale, there are plenty that are Chestertonian masterpieces. Stories like “The Wizard King” (an adaptation of Grimm’s “The Mongoose” / “The Hamster from the Water”) and “The Crabman’s Daughter” (an adaptation of von Schönwerth’s “The Jaws of the Merman”) both depict cruel and despotic kings whose power serves no one but themselves. In “The Crabman’s Daughter,” the king announces he and his royal pals will marry all the girls who live in the village by the lake, whether they want to or no. My young listeners have never been so angry. One hissed, “They should just revolution!” And another girl shouted, “We are women! And we are terrifying!” Don’t worry, though—a giant mermaid head rises from the lake, and the young women of the village walk into her mouth and disappear … and then reemerge as mermaids, free and fierce, untamable and, indeed, terrifying.
Decapitation, Physical and Emotional
And now I must be honest with you, as I was with that girl who asked why I tell such messed-up stories.
I’d leaned forward to show her the scar where my parents had cut off my head, and the room became silent as a castle’s crypt …
And then I laughed and straightened up and said, “There’s no scar.” She exhaled, relieved. I said, “My parents never cut off my head … physically.”
She caught her breath again.
Then I asked the kids how they would feel if their parents cut off their heads in order to save an old friend of theirs, like in my book; and even though their head was put back on and they were alive again—their parents couldn’t have known it was going to work out like that. How would you feel? And they said, “Angry!” “Mad!” “REVENGE!” And then someone said, “I would feel like they didn’t love me enough.” And someone else added, “I would feel betrayed.”
I said, “I hope none of your parents has ever done anything that made you feel angry, or mad, or betrayed, or like you wanted revenge, or like they didn’t love you enough. But I know mine have. They didn’t mean to. But when my parents got divorced, and my father acted like I should be okay with it—I felt like they’d cut my head off.
“So,” I said to that group of kids, “I’ve never had my head cut off physically.”
The girl said, “But you did emotionally.”
“And maybe some of you have, too,” I said. “Which is why I tell these messed-up stories.”
Back Home Again
David Foster Wallace inaugurated the genre of “intellectual on a cruise ship” reporting with his hilarious and sad essay, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” It became something of a staple: an elite magazine writer condescendingly gawking at ordinary Americans on cruises. Three decades later, Gary Shteyngart proposed putting the genre to rest in his essay “Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever.” He reasoned, “It is … unseemly to write about the kind of people who go on cruises. Our country does not provide the education and upbringing that allow its citizens an interior life. For the creative class to point fingers at the large, breasty gentlemen adrift in tortilla-chip-laden pools of water is to gather a sour harvest of low-hanging fruit.”
I am deeply sorry to report that he is right: Our country does not provide the education and upbringing that allow its citizens an interior life. There is altogether too much CocoMelon and The Apprentice and far too little sitting around a hearth, telling weird old stories that entertain the kids and Mom and Dad and Grandma and weird Uncle Rick all at once; stories that help us all cope with pressures internal and external; stories that give us faith that, despite the chaos that is outside and inside, we can still be strong and brave and kind and good; stories that imbue children and adults with the knowledge that, even though the chaos will never go away, we all can still live happily ever after.
So let us tell more of these stories. Let us sit on the ground and turn off the screens and tell each other fairy tales.
Adam Gidwitz is the New York Times bestselling author of A Tale Dark & Grimm and many other novels, including the Newbery Honor winner The Inquisitor’s Tale. His podcast Grimm, Grimmer, Grimmest is one of the most popular kids’ podcasts in the US.
Published January 2026