Do your kids know the little mermaid committed suicide?

[OnlyParentsAreReal]

I had I discussion with another mother about a new book I had got my son that had the little mermaid in. It says she "chose to ascend" which I thought was a lovely age appropriate way of putting across the original story. She was horrified and said she would never let her son know any of the true non Disney endings to stories. I think that's awful as the Disney endings send bad messages. What are peoples views on this?

The Goose Girl is splendidly morbid, especially the dead talking horse's head!

I can't remember where I heard the version of Cinderella with the bloody shoe (from her stepsisters' cut off toe and heel, respectively), but fancy slipping your foot into that! Bleugh!

My favourite Hans Christian Andersen story as a child was The Little Match girl, which was bleak as anything. Beautiful, though.

People need to give kids credit, they are perfectly able to take in some of the 'harder' emotive subject matters and deal with them. I had to sit my 10 year old down and discuss the Manchester Arena bombing/Bridge incidents etc. Done sensibly, with plenty of answers to their questions...they handle it fine.

My son has just finished reading the 3rd book to a series by a fab author called William Hussey - its sort of Harry Potter meets witches and witch-hunters. He's devoured those books and has spent time researching John Hopkins when he found out he was a real witch-hunter. Books, stories and discussions broaden kids minds and teach them to be inquisitive and have enquiring minds. A great thing I think

Have you read The Sleeper & the Spindle by Neil Gaiman? It's a twist on Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. I thought it was very clever.

I am a total wuss when it comes to reading books to mine. I edit everything! I can't stand the true scary endings to fairy tales, I make everything happy and marshmallowey and will continue to do so until...they learn to read!!

giving birth causes most to wake from a coma

Well, I daresay it would!

My dd must be impressionable as we read Hansel and gretl when she was 5 and she was very upset about the dad leaving his children in the woods.

That's interesting though, isn't it? I would imagine that for most small children that's something they can relate to much more easily than the idea of being eaten by a witch.

DS(5) and I love our 'real' fairy stories (though I generally refuse to read the Little Mermaid because I find it too horribly sad) and we like to compare the Disney versions, which he also loves.

I hated Hans Christian Andersen stories as a child as the endings left me feeling very depressed. Guess growing up with war traumatised/ depressed parents didn't help. Somehow the Grimm Bros stories, though grim didn't strike the same depressive note -- perhaps because the heroes generally win out in the end and one doesn't identify with the villains who meet a grisly end.
In the Little Mermaid I empathised with her when she got feet and every step was like walking on knives and that's the first image that comes to mind when the story is mentioned. And just what does that teach children?
Whereas the trad Grimms Bros stories teach children that determination and fortitude and resilience etc win out. The young and vulnerable can defeat the evil and the monsters.
I think HCAndersen needed psycho therapy to heal him from the trauma of his unhappy childhood.

I remember one about a fox and a hen and the fox wanted to eat the hen and trapped it into a bag and then undid it over a pot of boiling water but really it was a giant rock and it splashed all over the fox and burned him to death!

Don't want my children anywhere near that plot line to be honest...but they're generally much happier than I am with a bit of brutality in fairy tales

As someone said up thread, children have a harder time conceptualising and that's why as an adult the tales are more traumatic.

I had massive book of original Grimms Fairy Tales many of which are really violent. Several of them feature people - men and women - being put in a barrel lined with nails and rolled down a mountain as a punishment.

As I child, I loved those stories and didn't find any of it traumatic because you don't look any further beyond the literal meaning. That is totally different from a child witnessing something real like the Manchester bombing.

A story is taken as a story and cartoonish.

But some of those stories are evil! And the reactions - usually of the king - is to kill disobedient people or torture them.

I've still got my original fairytale books I got them for Christmas when I was 7/8.

Always loved the fact the Little Mermaid turned into sea foam .. not quite sure I grasped she had committed suicide until much older though

Yes, dahlietta, it prompted some very serious questions about parents abandoning children!

I was read the original stories from very very young. My favourite stories were about wolves yet every night from the age of 2/3 I had a nightmare about them. My mother still agreed to read them to me - poor boundaries - knowing that I’d have nightmares . Dd never heard the original ones and the wolf got chased away by the woodcutter for example. I didn’t want the cycle repeated.

The little match girl was also my favourite. Lovely and sad tale.

In the Little Mermaid I empathised with her when she got feet and every step was like walking on knives and that's the first image that comes to mind when the story is mentioned. And just what does that teach children?

I would say it teaches children to “be careful what you wish for!” or that the grass isn’t always greener. Be grateful for what you’ve got and love who you are, no matter what shape or form that takes!

I had no idea the Little Mermaid killed herself. I feel like my childhood was a lie.... however reading this thread makes me remember Granny dying and the woodcutter killing the wolf, the Ugly Stepsisters cutting off parts of their feet to fit in the shoes, H&G pushing the witch into the oven...... I vaguely remember having a book that I loved - I reckon it was these stories!

I don’t see the issue with telling the non-Disney versions but I don’t think you can put a specific age on as all children mature at different rates!

I hate the Princess and the Pea! My kids dont ask for it anymore because I always moan about snobbery and how Royalty arent anything out of the ordinary blah blah. It is also really dull. Its the only thing keeping Cinderella off the bottom in my 'least favourite fairytale' list!

I've been looking for the real fairytales, as my DS1 got told about them at school and wants them, but I cant find them!

Charles Perrault's Donkeyskin was a favourite of mine.

I always loved the darker fairytales... I'd make up happy alternative endings as a child.

Hop 'o my Thumb (the seven league boots) was also a favourite.

I do need remember the book my Granny had but there was a fabulous mix of dark tales/classic fairytales within, and some pretty dark illustrations too!

Loved my 'traditional stereotype red riding hood' Granny reading these to me when I was a child.

Never much liked Disney (though never much loathed Disney either)

i remember the fox and the hen!

and also there was a story about people rubbing a lump on their head with different things I think, a piece of meat?! Though cannot recall what happened.

Does anyone recognise this song from a tale as dying to know what it was: happy days, do you remember those happy days, we had such fun in so many ways, walking down the lane and making a daisy chain, playing in the sun, and laughing in the rain, whistling with the birds and humming with the bees, sitting in the shade by the weaping willow trees, do you remember all those happy days, they'll all come back again I know because you have told me so?!

And tinderbox

slit her own throat and threw herself into the see to join the other poor souls

She became sea foam, which is apparently what happens to mermaids instead of progressive decomposition and consumption by scavenger species. Oddly enough I was just thinking about the story a week or so back looking at the foam on the shore at Beadnell Bay.

MyLittleDragon, the point of the original Princess and the Pea is that it's snobbish nonsense to think that a princess is so delicate that she can feel a pea as she sleeps. In the more recent version it's dull as ditchwater - the secret princess goes to bed, demonstrates that she really is a princess by feeling the pea (and through several mattresses too) and they get married. In the better version it's a peasant girl who overhears the plan to prove she's not a princess. The first night she has just one mattress and complains bitterly about the pea disturbing her. The second night two mattresses etc., until the Queen is fooled and pronounces her a princess. Because people of higher status aren't actually so sensitive that they can't sleep with a pea under their mattress - it's all rubbish.

I seem to remember that version too but all of the sites with the so-called original text are a very short version where it is a real princess.

Ah this seems to explain it.

www.surlalunefairytales.com/princesspea/history.html

I've never heard of the version you refer to, youcan. It is definitely a version from what you say but it's not the original.

I had to laugh at suggesting a fairy story couldn't be so because it would be "snobbish nonsense" also your very serious assertation that people if higher status aren't actually so sensitive they could feel a pea under a mattress... you don't say

After all, fairy stories are there to present a no-nonsense, realistic version of life...

Which is the one where the girl has to weave shirts out of nettles to turn her brothers back into humans from swans? She doesn't quite finish her task and one brother is left with one wing for an arm. I always cringed at that one, having had a few nettling incidents as a young child.

Tinkly I remember that one, it was The Six Swans