AIBU in thinking that not all kids stories need to end happily?

[Troublesometrucker]

I don't want to hijack another perfectly good thread so creating this one to ask this question.

I just don't feel it's damaging to children to have stories which don't have happy endings personally. Most of the fairy tales are pretty grim but people don't get half as upset over them or think about the impact they have on children as they do with faith stories for example.

I was horrified to discover that little red riding hood did not in fact have a tea party with her new friend wolf at the age of 5. It was quite devastating actually. I think I'd have been better prepared that sometimes things don't end well if my well meaning parents didn't shelter me from every sad ending and change the stories I was exposed to when tiny.

Am I a terrible parent for telling my 2 year old she was eaten up by the wolf? AFAIK he's coped ok with it.

Some of it is different taste, and styles - i loved the original Grimms fairy tales as a child, my favourite was the little Goose Girl, where they put the imposter bride in a barrel lined with nails and ride her through the town, and loved the Little Red Shoes, but the Matchstick Girl had to be sent back to school with a note saying 'Whispers could not read this without crying, we tried every night for a week and she is still having nightmares'.

I think stories are how children learn to process, and it is lost in adults not wanting to 'lose' their innocence or having to explain the hardest facts of life (how do you explain why someone had died???)

When I was 7, I remember our form teacher reading 'Good night mr tom' to us, although it does end happily there is a horrific bit in the middle where the boy's barmy evil mum locks him in a cupboard with a dead baby and leaves him there to die, until mr. tom comes along with his dog and finds him.

Oh my god that bit stayed with me for years! Very harrowing.

I must have been about 8 or something when I read it, I remember staying up all night reading the book as I coukdnt bear to put it down at such a sad bit.

I still hate thinking about that section.

We have a couple of stories based on fairy tales which are wickedly sinister.
The first is a about goldilocks gate crashing a party and ending up in a pie which grandma has made, served up as a dish best served cold.
The other is about the big and wolf struggling to make a pancake recipe, asking for help which his neighbours refused, then as they all pile into his house to help him eat them, he locks them in a eats them all (the neighbours, and probably also the pancakes!) - they're brilliant stories!
Yanbu :)

I was raised on the german fairy tale book 'StrewelPeter', now that IS messed up!

Dd6 has only cracked over the selfish giant, chicken licken didn't even raise an eyebrow.

However the youngest has come downstairs saying she's having bad dreams about growing up and HAVING to work

Not quite sure which work of fiction is going to semi prepare her for that particular reality.....

However the youngest has come downstairs saying she's having bad dreams about growing up and HAVING to work

You do have your work cut out! Bless her!

my dd was read Goodnight Mr Tom last year at school aged 8

I hate a sad ending. Dd is keen on Jacqueline Wilson who often has quite ambivalent endings neither happy or sad, but with things O.Kish and possibilities of new things happening soon, which is probably quite realistic. In real life things don't end but are constantly moving on.

YANBU.

I agree that there should be a balance. Life's not all happily ever after, and stories with sad or ambivalent endings are one way of helping children learn about that.

I also remember reading lots of the original fairy tales as a child. Agree it's terrible what Disney did to the ending of the Little Mermaid.

surprised to hear goodnight mr. tom is still being read to kids.....but good, it's a good, classic book. My teacher left us in suspense re the cupboard incident, we had to wait until the next day's instalment to find out if he'd be saved. I think I barely slept with anticipation.

I am definitely going to include some 'sad ending' /'sad middle' books with my kids. It is a way for them to learn about life without having to experience it in reality. Also I like the trad fairy tales which can be quite dark at times, I always believed the wolf in three little pigs is eaten at the end.

I grew up in the 70's and red riding hood never had a tea party with the wolf, so wrong. At best the wolf was killed.

I don't like my children to be only exposed to stories with happy endings. Or stories where it ended well because a moral was learnt, oh great we all worked as a team and solved the problem. Yay.

I have no problem with them being exposed to stories where it didn't work out in tHe end.

Roald Dahl's book "The Witches" has a bittersweet ending. However, in the film of The Witches from about 1990, although great in many ways, the ending was rewritten to be happy, to the disgust of Roald Dahl himself.

Danny the Champion on the World is another interesting one: the end is not quite the triumph expected, but the last chapter has a huge "moving on" feel.

The Happy Prince (the Ladybird book and tape) had some of the saddest moments ever. "A policeman saw two boys huddled under a bridge, and told them to go home. He did not know that they had no home to go to. They just went out, hand in hand, into the rain..." And the ending was not exactly happy.

I remember Strewelpeter! Even as a kid, I liked most of the stories in it: great for teaching children about consequences, although the story of "little suck-a-thumb" was gruesome.