Cinderella

link:http://www.allthingsfrugal.com/cind.htm
For a long time, by reading Grimm’s Fairy Tale and Andersen’s Fairy Tales, young children establish their first impression of the world at the very beginning of life. Cinderella, one of the most famous fairy tales around the world is known by almost every kid; and they are dreaming of being such a lucky lady.
A significant characteristic of Cinderella is that the pretty girl will be cared and loved. At the first sight, the prince falls in love with her, even though he absolutely dose not know her personality. Young children may not feel anything wrong with it, but it makes me feel the man is quite superficial and his love is cheap as well. A professor of Purdue University has conducted a research about the 168 fairy tales of Grimm brothers. She discovered that 94% of them mentioned looks, 13.6 times per piece, especially in one piece the author described beauty 114 times. In 17% of those fairy tales ugly were linked up with evil, and in most stories ugly ladies came to a sticky end. As a result, young girls may believe beauty success just because they have pretty face, and then they may ignore education and become eager in make-ups and clothes rather than careers. Maybe in future fairy tales, authors are supposed to start a story like “One upon a time, a common-looking princess lived in a castle……” rather than always start with “One upon a time, a beautiful princess……”
Is there anything unreasonable in Cinderella? At 12 midnight, everything becomes to what they are originally, except the crystal shoes. However, without the crystal shoes the prince will never find Cinderella; what we want is just the “Happy Ever After” mode ending. If this is allowed, how about the bad treatment Cinderella suffers from. After all, audiences of fairy tales are most children. It is easy to mislead them that stepmothers are pitiless and cruel—stepmothers are fixed to negative images.
Now that the topic is about fairy tales, we can not ignore the genre of Cinderella—genre of fairy tales. “Once upon a time…and they lived happily ever after” is special beginning and ending words. Good characters, evil characters, royalty, castle and magic are all elements present in most of these stories. And every coin has two sides. After all, beautiful princess including Cinderella are kind-hearted, have amiable disposition and suffer from unfortunate experiment at beginning that incite pity. Through fairy tales, children start to understand the world; their minds are full with niceness thanks to those beautiful things; they believe that evil will finally come to a sticky end because of fixed mode; children begin to learn words used to tell the stories. And the most important, fairy tales quicken imagination of children and encourage children emulate kindness of those princesses.
In conclusion, the proper way of dealing with Cinderella for parents is to discuss the plot and the characters with children and figure out what children are encouraged to do nor not.