Childism and the Grimms' Fairy Tales

or How We Have Happily Rationalized Child Abuse through Storytelling

A week ago I participated in a Huffington Post Internet panel discussion about

fairy tales with three people, who began waxing poetic about the wonders of the fairy tale
and how it benefited children la Bettelheim. I, too, was a little guilty of this, not of
waxing poetic about Bettelheim, but about the utopian qualities of the fairy tale. And
then, at one point, I blurted out something like: "We've been talking too much about the
virtues of fairy tales, while they're really terrible! They're sexist and racist! They stem
from patriarchal societies, and depict white men as saviors and women as comatose and
barbie-doll princesses." Everyone laughed, and then we became serious shifting the topic
to discuss some of the negative qualities of fairy tales, but we did not go far enough in
our ideological critique. We did not discuss the childist aspects of fairy tales and how the
tales reveal prejudices against children and young people, and how they might partially
socialize children to accept the abuse they suffer, even today, without realizing it.
So now I want to make up for a lapse in the Huffington discussion, and I want to
focus first on the subtle and not so subtle childist aspect of the Grimms' fairy tales and
then relate the abuses that they reflect to Elizabeth Young-Bruehl's significant work,
Childism, which is one of the most important studies of child abuse that has appeared in
recent years and has not received the public attention that it serves. Of course, the
Grimms' tales have never had to worry about neglect of attention. It is almost as if they
are embedded within us despite their so-called Germanic origins.Yet, there are childist

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aspects of the tales that we have ignored, and I would like to begin by exploring how
numerous tales in their famous collection are geared to rationalize the manner in which
adults use and exploit children and encourage children to devote themselves to parents
and sovereigns without questioning how they are treated. There are links between
authors, authority, and authoritarianism. Let me begin with two tales that may lay the
groundwork of our analysis of the childist aspects of the Grimms' tales.

The Stubborn Child (1812)

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Once upon a time there was a stubborn child who never did what his mother told
him to do. The dear Lord, therefore, did not look kindly upon him and let him become
sick. No doctor could cure him, and in a short time he lay on his deathbed. After he was
lowered into his grave and was covered over with earth, one of his little arms suddenly
emerged and reached up into the air. They pushed it back down and covered the ground
with fresh earth, but that didn't help. The little arm kept popping out. So the child's
mother had to go to the grave herself and smack the little arm with a switch. After she
had done that, the arm withdrew, and then for the first time, the child had peace beneath
the earth.

The Stubborn Child (2008)

Anna Maria Shua
In the section of their work dedicated to children's legends, the Brothers Grimm
refer to a popular German story that in its time was considered an appropriate cautionary
tale for children. A stubborn boy was punished by God with illness and death, but after all
that, he still didn't mend his ways. His pale little arm, with its hand like an open flower,
would poke out of the grave time and time again. Only when his mother gave him a good
swat with a hazelnut stick, did his little arm slip below the earth again, proof that the
child had found peace.
Those of us who have passed by that cemetery know, however, that it still creeps
out whenever he thinks no one's looking. Now it's the strong and hairy arm of an adult
man, with fingers cracked and nails encrusted with dirt from struggling to force its way

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up and down. Sometimes the hand makes obscene gestures, surprisingly modern ones,
which philologists assume are meant for the Brothers Grimm.1
Shua is a contemporary Argentinean writer, who brilliantly exposes the childist
and sexist features of the Grimms' tales, and I might add, she also speaks to the resilience
of the young still within the hearts of older people as we seek to defy the cultural system
that has whipped us into characters with habituses that can be manipulated in arbitrary
ways. Indeed, a critique of this tale requires us to question the arbitrary power of a makebelieve god who actively strikes down an independent child and uses the child's mother
to carry out his dirty work. And it is dirty work that the mother performs in the name of a
fictitious god. But in reality she must clean up and cover up the crimes adults commit
against children.
Most people have never read "The Stubborn Child" or are aware that it is a
Grimms' tale, and this is because we do not want to read tales, especially a Grimm's tale,
which exposes the brutality of adults so openly. We prefer to sugar-coat our selection of
the Grimms' tales and seek out those that end with happy endings. Yet, even those tales
are fundamentally childist, that is, they tend to undermine the autonomy of children and
young people, and overlook their maltreatment because the young always triumph in the
end or find some kind of happiness and are in harmony with the world. But happiness is
also related to succumbing to the approval of adult standards of success. Therefore, it is
important that we revisit the tales with a focus on the initial abuse and remember how this
abuse will be played down and forgotten by the happy ends of the tales. Let me give you
some examples and also remind you that well over 30% of the 210 Grimms' tales involve
some kind of child abuse and/or abandonment.

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1) In "A Tale about the Boy Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was" a younger
son is called a dumbell and humiliated and then given to a sexton who intends to smooth
over his rough edges. The boy goes off to learn about the creeps.
2) In "Brother and Sister" two children are beaten every day and get nothing but
leftovers for food. They go off into the wide world. Eventually they find some sort of
happiness.
3) In "Rapunzel" parents give their twelve-year old to a sorceress, who
incarcerates the girl. After the sorceress discovers that Rapunzel has made love to a man,
she banishes the girl to a desolate place where she is later re-united with her blinded
lover.
4) In "Cinderella" a young girl is treated like a slave by her stepmother and
stepsisters. She gets a prince, and her stepsisters get their eyes pecked out.
5) In "Mother Holle" a stepmother treats her beautiful good stepdaughter cruelly.
However, because she works like a slave for Mother Holle and is industrious, she is
rewarded by the strange mother goddess, while the ugly bad daughter is later punished by
Mother Holle because she is lazy.
6) In "Little Red Cap" a young girl is eaten by a wolf because she does not listen
to her mother
7) In "Mother Trudy" a girl who is stubborn, curious, and disobedient goes to visit
the mysterious Mother Trudy who changes her into a block of wood and throws her into a
fire.

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8) In "The Juniper Tree" a young boy is killed by his stepmother, who then chops
up his body and serves the boy in a stew to his father. He later returns as a bird to seek
revenge on the stepmother.
9) In "Snow White" a stepmother, originally a biological mother, attempts to have
her seven-year-old step-daughter murdered because the queen is jealous of her beauty.
The girl flees to live with seven dwarfs and becomes their housewife and later the castle
wife of a prince.
10) In "Sweetheart Roland" a stepmother, who is really a witch, tries to chop off
the head of her stepdaughter. Instead she mistakenly chops off her own daughter's head,
while her stepdaughter flees with her sweetheart Roland.
11) In "All Fur" a king seeks to marry his own daughter after his wife dies and to
commit the sin of incest. The Princess flees disguised in a coat all made of fur. She
basically forgives her father.
12) In "The Water Nixie" a nixie forces two children who fall down a well to
work for her. Eventually, they flee.
13) In "The Raven" there is a queen who has a daughter, and because this child
was naughty and wouldn't keep quiet, the mother wishes her daughter would become a
raven and fly away so that she could have her peace and quiet. Indeed, the daughter is
transformed into a raven and flies into a forest and eventually marries a prince.
14) In "Iron Hans" a king wants to execute his son because he has disobeyed his
orders. So, the son runs away with Iron Hans and later is reconciled with his father.

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15) In "The Ungrateful Son," a son is punished for not sharing a meal with his
father. A toad leaps on his face, sticks to it forever, and the son must wander the world
feeding the toad.
16) In "The Old beggar Woman," a young rascal invites an old beggar woman into
his house to warm herself, but he doesn't do anything to help her when her rags catch fire
and she burns to death.
17) In "The Stolen Pennies," a child keeps returning to a room as a ghost because
he had stolen two pennies that he was to give a poor man, and after the boy's early death,
he is not able to rest because of the theft he committed.
18) In "Eve's Unequal Children" Eve sanctions God's unequal treatment of her
ugly and misshapen children who are assigned to lower-class roles.
19) In "The Poor Boy in the Grave" a poor shepherd boy who becomes an orphan
is placed in the house of a rich man who beats him mercilessly and drives the boy to
suicide.
20) In "The Maiden without Hands" a miller cuts off the hands of his daughter to
save himself from the devil, and she flees her home after this mutilation. But she does
wed a prince in the end.
Despite happy endings -- and not all of these tales end happily -- and moral
injunctions in the tales, none of them question the right of adults to discipline children
severely according to principles that justify their arbitrary power over the young. Often
parents and adults act in the name of a Christian god to justify their actions. Often the
children pray to god for help. Perhaps the two most insidious tales that rationalize child
abuse and abandonment are "Hansel and Gretel" and "Faithful Johannes," and I say

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insidious because they appear to be celebrating such values as faithfulness, true devotion,
and generosity, while perpetuating the sacrifice of children to a patriarchal system of
arbitrary beliefs and values. "Hansel and Gretel," the more popular of the two, assumes a
sexist perspective by emphasizing that it is the mother/stepmother, who wants to abandon
the children in the forest, not the father; that it is a witch who wants to devour them, and
that the children should return to their father with a treasure and not question or reject
him when he has played a negative role in their lives by abandoning them. In "Faithful
Johannes" the plot of the story and situation of the helpless children is somewhat different
and more like the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, which is also in the Koran. The
question raised by these stories is: Should we kill our children to demonstrate our
devotion to a god? And the answer in the Bible, the Koran, and stories like "Faithful
Johannes" is quite simply, yes., and Alice Miller, the perspicacious psychiatrist and
defender of children, explains why in her book, The Body Never Lies:
The tradition of sacrificing children is deeply oriented in most cultures and
religions. For this reason it is also tolerated, and indeed commended, in our western
civilization. Naturally, we no longer sacrifice our sons and daughters on the altar of God,
as in the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. But at birth and throughout their later
upbringing, we instill in them the necessity to love, honor, and respect us, to do their best
for us, to satisfy our ambitions in short to give us everything our parents denied us. We
call this decency and morality. Children rarely have any choice in the matter. All their
lives, they will force themselves to offer parents something that they neither possess nor
have any knowledge of, quite simply because they have never been given it: genuine,
unconditional love that does not merely serve to gratify the needs of the recipient. 2
********************************
It is now time to turn to Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and the theses in her book,
Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children.3

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Every single thinking person in the United States, and not only in the United
States, must take it upon herself/himself to read Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's recent book,
Childism. It is especially a must for those of us who work with and live with children.
Young-Bruehl's major thesis is clear and simple: "People as individuals and in societies
mistreat children in order to fulfill certain needs through them, to project internal
conflicts and self-hatreds outward, or to assert themselves when they feel their authority
has been questioned. But regardless of their individual motivations, they all rely upon a
societal prejudice against children to justify themselves and legitimate their behavior." (1)
Given this widespread prejudice almost every adult in America tends to act
against children while thinking that he or she is actually doing what may be best for the
child. In other words, we all live in a contradictory relationship with children. We dictate
what they should learn and how they behave without listening to their needs and wants
and without paying attention to their developmental capacities. We are all to a greater or
lesser degree guilty of childism, and Young-Bruehl argues for the necessity of using
terms such as childism and childist so that we can more consciously overcome our
common prejudice.
Some people might ask skeptically whether we need another ism. After all we
have racism, sexism, ageism, Anti-Semitism not to mention all sorts of other isms such as
communism, socialism, fascism, and so on. Can't we just continue fighting for children's
rights and legislation to protect them without fostering another ism. But Young-Bruehl
argues that to confront a prejudice that has been repressed or not fully articulated, we
must name it, identify the motivations and causes, and articulate ways to overcome the
prejudice. As she says, " The word childism could. . . guide us to an understanding of

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various behaviors and acts against children and childhood. . . .Childism could help
identify as related issues child imprisonment, child exploitation and abuse, substandard
schooling, high infant mortality rates, fetal alcohol syndrome, the reckless prescription of
antipsychotic drugs to children, child pornography, and all other behaviors or policies that
are not in the best interests of children. The behavior of adults who are childist -- most of
whom are parents -- harms directly or indirectly the huge human population under the age
of eighteen, which is now close to a third of the population worldwide, and in some
places more than half." (7)
Understanding how we are all complicit in childism is crucial for us to adjust our
behavior and to contend with a prejudice that we all have and that we don't fully
recognize. It is to Young-Bruehl's credit that she opens up a discussion of a prejudice that
we do not acknowledge enough. But before I continue to discuss some of Young-Bruehl's
notions of childism, her historical and critical analysis of adult motivation and
rationalization, and her proposals for confronting the prejudice against children, I want
first to present some statistics and facts about childism that are illuminating or need more
illumination:
1) America incarcerates more of its children than any country in the world. Half a million
American children are currently in juvenile detention centers where many of them are
victims of abuse and neglect.
2) The United States was the country that pioneered strategies to prevent child abuse and
now spends more money fighting it than do all other industrialized countries and has the
highest rate of child abuse in the world. More children are reported for child abuse and
neglect in the United States than in all the other industrialized countries combined.

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3) America lags behind the rest of the international community in its care for children.
U.S. Laws do not meet children's developmental needs or defend their rights, and the
United States has yet to support the 1959 Declaration of the Rights of the Child or ratify
the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.
4) The number of children and families experiencing homelessness in the United States is
alarming. The Urban Institute estimates that 1.35 million children will experience
homelessness over the course of a year (Urban Institute, 2000); and the number of
children and youth in homeless situations (PreK-12) identified by State Departments of
Education increased from approximately 841,700 in 1997 to 930,200 in 2000 (U.S.
Department of Education, 2000).
According to the Wilder Research Foundation, in 2009, the study counted 9,654
homeless adults, youth, and children and estimates the overall number of homeless
people in Minnesota to be at least 13,100 on any given night. the number of homeless
children with their parents, now about one-third of the homeless population, increased
from 2,726 to 3,251 since the last study. Nearly half (47%) are age 5 and under, the
average age is 6 and one-half.
5) The Child Defense Fund's new report The State of America's Children 2011 finds
children have fallen further behind in many of the leading indicators over the past year as
the country slowly climbs out of the recession. This is a comprehensive compilation and
analysis of the most recent and reliable national and state-by-state data on population,
poverty, family structure, family income, health, nutrition, early childhood development,
education, child welfare, juvenile justice, and gun violence. The report provides key child
data showing alarming numbers of children at risk: children are the poorest age group

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with 15.5 million childrenone in every five children in Americaliving in poverty, and
more than 60 percent of fourth, eighth and 12th grade public school students are reading
or doing math below grade level.
I am mentioning these sad statistics and facts to set Young-Bruehl's book and my
remarks in a socio-cultural context of an insidious civilizing process in America. I use the
word insidious because, despite the fruits of this civilizing process for privileged groups
in America, it is seductive and harmful at the same time. In fact, though appealing, it is
like a viral disease that works its way into our habitus, into our customs and behavior that
become second-nature to us, so that we act against the very little and defenseless people
whom we love most. Childism, in this regard, is more than just a prejudice but also a
disease, and I believe that Young-Bruehl's book is a diagnosis of the disease and a
proposal for a cure.
Let me briefly summarize the contents of her book before I suggest ways in which
we might incorporate her ideas into our own daily praxis of mediating tales with children,
especially the Grimms tales, that is, telling the tales and fostering interest in the tales in a
socially responsible manner. Let me also briefly mention some facts about Elisabeth
Young-Bruehl, who unfortunately died in December of 2011. She had studied at the New
School with the great German-Jewish philosopher Hanna Arendt, and after her
graduation, while teaching philosophy at Wesleyan College, she wrote a biography of
Arendt as well as one of Anna Freud. During the 1980s she enrolled at the New Haven
Child Study Center and eventually became a psychotherapist receiving a degree in
psychotherapy from the Philadelphia Association for Psychoanalysis in 1999 and starting
a practice as a psychotherapist in Philadelphia and later New York. Her major book

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during her work on psychotherapy was The Anatomy of Prejudices (1996). She was also
the author of books and essays on feminism and psychotherapy. In 2007 she moved to
Toronto, where she continued her work as a psychotherapist and was engaged in the
struggle for children's rights until her death in 2011.
Young-Bruehl's book is divided into seven chapters: 1) Anatomy of a Prejudice;
2) Three forms of Childism: Anna's Story; 3) Child Abuse and Neglect: A Study in
Confusion; 4) The Politicization of child Abuse; 5) Mass Hysteria and Child Sexual
Abuse; 6) Forms of Childism in Families; 7) Education and the End of Childism.
What is new and original in her study is her approach: she combines a psychoanalytical
perspective with a socio-political and historical analysis of our present insidious
"civilizing" of children. I shall not review all the chapters, only those that are applicable
to storytelling and to the Grimms' tales and to the social-cultural-political context in
which we use tales for children, including the cinema, television, and internet.
In chapter one she argues that children are a target group of prejudice and that in
order to understand how the prejudice works, we must explore the various motivations of
the victimizers, something that is rarely done. The foundation for prejudice against
children can be traced back to Greek civilization that laid the basis for the prejudice in the
Judeo-Christian tradition. To quote Young-Bruehl: "Aristotle's assumptions about
children -- that they are possessions and lack reasoning ability -- are childist.
Nonetheless, they fit well with the common assumptions of the Greeks, and they were
easily built into the European tradition after Aristotle, where they continued to intertwine
with sexism and justifications of slavery (which eventually became racist). The idea that
children are by nature meant to be owned by their male parent and that they lack reason

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has justified treating them like slaves and like immature, unformed persons without the
active qualities, the developmental thrust, the proto reasoning and choosing, and the
individuality that contemporary developmentalists now recognize in them." (25-26).
Prejudice in general is a belief system, not a knowledge system about a particular
group, and as a belief system, stereotypes of the targeted groups are formed based on
some obvious distinguishing appearances, but more on activities and functions attributed
to the group by way of fantasies. Young-Bruehl maintains that there are three elementary
forms of fantasy, related to sexism, racism, and anti-Semitism, and childism can involve
all three forms of fantasy, belief, and action, and they are: 1) fantasies about being able to
self-reproduce and to own the self-reproduced offspring; 2) fantasies about being able to
have slaves -- usually sex slaves -- who are not incest objects, and 3) fantasies about
being able to eliminate something felt to be invidiously or secretly depleting one from
within. (35). "At the more fundamental motivational or fantasy level," Young-Bruehl
argues, "childism can be defined as a belief system that constructs its target group, "the
child," as an immature being produced and owned by adults who use it to serve their own
needs and fantasies. It is a belief system that reverses the biological and psychological
order of nature, in which adults are responsible for meeting the irreducible needs of
children (until the adults grow old and, naturally, reciprocally need support from
children). Adults have needs of various kinds -- and fantasies about those needs -- that
childist adults imagine children could and, further, should serve. The belief that children
as children could serve adults needs is a denial that children develop; the belief that
children should serve adult needs is a denial of children's developmental needs and
rights." (36).

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Young-Bruehl maintains: "Our characters are the sum of our inherited or inborn
characteristics interwoven with psychic habit we develop from childhood on into
adulthood. Our habits include habits of working over in ourselves traumas we have
undergone, habits of assimilating to what we have been taught, and habits of projecting.
Our characters encompass both our biological nature (sometimes called temperament)
and our 'second nature,' acquired in and from our familial, social, and political culture."
These comments should be related to Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the habitus.
Using Freud's classification of character types -- the hysterical, the obsessional,
and the narcissistic -- Young-Bruehl maintains that we all have the tendencies of these
character types that we endeavor to balance as we engage and interact with the world.
Since it is impossible to retain peace and harmony, we are constantly seeking to balance
certain urges and fantasies as we mature and form our characters. At times, there are
breakdowns and we cannot contain a particular tendency or any tendency and we become
neurotic. Young Bruehl writes: "a neurosis could be described as a breakdown or a
running off the road (to a greater or lesser degree) during a characterological journey
toward maturity. Characteristic distortions result, and I would add that characteristic
prejudices result, as a person struggles to regain harmony. A prejudice is a neurosis or
developmental problem played out projectively in the world, among people. . . . One of
the key ways people have of keeping themselves on an even keel is projecting their
conflicts onto others; they throw their baggage overboard in a storm. The result is a
prejudice rather than a neurosis." (48-49)
Young-Bruehl moves from a discussion of individual character types to discuss
how entire families and societies are affected by people with these characteristics. As she

15
remarks (53): "there are families and societies where hysterica , obsessional, and
narcissistic people predominate or control the main social, economic, and political
institutions, organizing and operating the institutions according to their characterological
needs and prejudices. So there are, then, societies organized around hysterical dramas,
scenes full of conflict, and moral panics or mass hysterias; societies organized around
obsessional rituals, control mechanisms, and paranoid ideas; and societies organized
around grandiosity, identity-assertion propaganda, and efforts to dictate the future.
Sometimes societal character is lasting, staying relatively constant over generations, but
sometimes -- particularly under contemporary conditions in which the media have such
influence - societal characters shift and change in less than a generation." For instance
she cites that what is known as a generation gap is a time of rapid social character shift,
often spurred by a group revolt of the young against the prevailing characterological
constraints of their elders."
Chapter Four, "The Politicization of Child Abuse," begins this way: "By the end
of the 1970s , with the defeat of the progressive Comprehensive Child Development Act
and the field of Child Abuse and Neglect in disarray, the damage being done to the
nation's children was becoming evident to many Americans. Money to fund Child
Protective Services was minimal. The child poverty rate was rising year by year, and the
nation was declining on international measures of child well-being in almost every area.
Daycare was scarce and often of poor quality -- unless you could afford a nanny or send
your child to a private program. The nation's divorce rate was rising, too, but there was
no help for the children of these divorces, no resources outside their immediate or
extended families. As the number of broken families was rising, Ronald Reagan

16
capitalized on the widespread anxiety in his presidential campaign of 1979 with a
platform that called for reaffirming 'family values' and reinforcing parents' rights over
children's.
Conflict of generations during the latter part of the 20th century emerged and is
still ongoing. On p. 165 Young-Bruehl writers: "Child sexual abuse has become a site of
contestation between children and adults; a political and legal battlefield, it stands at the
crossroads of generational conflict and transmission of trauma. Understanding adult
motivations and their legitimating belief systems (childism) is of great importance in
helping children who are reported as physically abused or neglected, but it is critical to
helping children reported as sexually abused because those children will be caught up not
only in the drama of having their families investigated and probably prosecuted but in a
vast social-political drama of adult-child relationships. How to deal with a family in
which sexual abuse has taken place becomes a key social and political question. (165-66)
This situation has to be seen against the background of a general rule about
childism: sexual abuse serves the childisms of hysterical role manipulation and
narcissistic identity erasure, but it seldom serves the childism of obsessional elimination,
while acts of physical and emotional neglect often do. Sexual victims are kept in the
house, not eliminated; their service is required, their availability is bound up with their
abuser's desire and fantasies. Sexual abusers manipulate sexual roles and confuse the
child victims, making them doubt their own identity, and this is part of the abuser's
purpose, a source of their pleasure and their satisfaction. Sexual abusers may also erase
the child's self, including his or her capacity to tell the truth of the experience, so
that they can control the story.

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This last point is extremely important, and Young-Bruehl goes on to support the
notion that it is crucial to believe what children say about what they have experienced.
Children do not fabricate stories of detailed sexual activities unless they have witnessed
them, and they have, indeed, been witnesses to their abuse.
Toward the end of this chapter Young-Bruehl discusses the conservative and
narcissistic turn of Baby Boomers, "Child sexual abuse represented a direct challenge to
the fortress of the family and to the 'family values' ideologists, but it also constantly
challenged claims to 'the truth' that came from all political directions including that of
theorists who were primarily focused on sexism and its harms, which were thought to fall
similarly on women and children. A narcissistic culture is one in which claims to
possession or ownership of 'the truth' go along with claims to ownership of children and
ownership of the future that children represent. And a narcissistic culture is one in which
denial and lying become so accepted that all statements -- including children's
descriptions of their abuse -- are said to be lies. Like the adults around them, children can
learn in such a culture to say as a matter of self-protection -- protection of their identities
-- what they think others want them to hear." (186-87)
Young Bruehl concludes this chapter by stating: on p. 194: "Sexual abuse is the
type of abuse that depends most for its discovery on the verbal testimony of the victim,
and the victim alone, so it is not surprising that in this area of study questions about the
reliability of children's testimony have been more important than motivational questions
or definitional questions about what acts constitute abuse and what penalties should be
legislated.

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One of the crucial questions Young Bruehl asks throughout her book is: What
makes parents turn against their children? What are the motivations? She argues on 226:
"A person who believes that children are owned by their parents and that their identities
can be shaped and molded at parental will can use any type of act to bring this about. The
acts are weapons in a war between the generations. And it is impossible to understand the
war through inventories of the weapons or by counting the number of children who have
themselves become weapons. Nor is it possible to work for peace and the prevention of
further wars. She concludes her book by discussing the necessity for better education to
end childism. She argues that "child advocates of all sorts must address not only the
conditions of the specific abuse but the conscious and unconscious justifications for it:
the childism of the abusers and the childism within American society. They need to
legislate and enforce a national comprehensive child development program, drawing on
the best Child Development science, that articulates a minimum standard of attention to
each child's needs. And they must articulate a platform of children's rights like the U. N.
Declaration and Convention on the Rights of the Child, and find ways to monitor and
enforce them. . . crucial to achieving these political aims is the education of both adults
and children about prejudice against children and how it is manifested within individuals
within families, and within American culture.
Seven irreducible needs:
1) Loving, attentive interaction between the child and its caretakers.
2) Physical protection, safety, and regulation.

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3) Avoidance of standardized or over-ritualized childrearing or education. For instance
testing is about failing and being tracked according to failure. Children are shamed and
humiliated by such an approach.
4) Each child should be provided with an emotional and intellectual environment
appropriate to the child's developmental stage.
5) No physical discipline or corporal punishment by limiting setting, structure, and
expectations.
6) Stable communities and cultural continuity. Greater parental participation of parents in
school and community.
7) Protecting the future -- adults must keep in mind not just their own children, or their
community's children, or American children, but all children.
Finally, Young-Bruehl discusses the history of American schooling and its
transformation in the late 20th century.
p. 289 -- Historians critical of American schools and schooling have described how the
nineteenth-century common schools -- which began as one-room schools without any age
differentiation, much less tracking of abilities -- turned into huge factory like institutions
that directed students toward their future occupations on the basis of their class, sex, and
race. Progressive educators reacted against the privatizing vision from the start,
emphasizing its authoritarian and utilitarian purposes: the majority of children were being
schooled to fulfill adult needs and to fulfill particular low-level positions in adult
enterprises, not to develop their potentialities and their characters. The teaching methods
were producing generations of role-reversed children, eliminated from opportunities,
manipulated into preset roles in workforces, and deprived of encouragement to

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independent thought. The schools practiced all kinds of childism at once -- eliminative,
manipulative, and erasing -- under the rubric of 'tracking."
Because they were well financed, American post World War II public schools
were, despite their basically childist organization, consistently ranked higher than schools
elsewhere in the developed world. That ranking lasted until the late 1970s, when a
decline began that has not been remedied. Without corporate funding, the inherent
inequality of the tracked schools grew worse, at the same time that inequalities within
American society were growing. When parents and legislators woke up to the crisis in the
school system, they once again turned to standardized testing and teaching as the solution
-- though this time students were tracked into different types of schools at both the
elementary and high school levels. The U.S. educational system now consists of public
schools, some well-endowed and some with almost no funding, private schools, and
recently the hybrid charter schools, which are corporately owned but funded with a mix
of public and private money.
At the bottom of all the agendas at these schools is the childist notion that children are to
be trained and educated to fulfill the needs of adults not according to their developmental
needs.

Comments on using storytelling to counter childism

As Young-Bruehl points out, children who are abused physically and psychologically
have difficulty telling their own stories because they are afraid to tell the truth, do not
know how to articulate their feelings that are often confused, are prompted to tell adults
what the adults want to hear, and know that they will not be heard or that there will be no

21
adequate response to their stories. Yet, they need to and are eager to confide their stories
in some one. Their best hope is an understanding therapist or some one outside the family
such as a social worker. But sometimes therapists and social workers are not responsive.
Therefore, knowing how to tell a story with confidence and integrity may enable a child
to confront his or her difficulties. Knowing how to use stories to navigate oneself through
life is crucial for any child. Our contribution to the development of children with whom
we work is to assist them in developing their capacity to tell their own tales to help them
learn the art of storytelling.
I began this talk by discussing how "terrible" the Grimms' tales are. I should have
probably used the adjectives "terrifying," "dangerous," or "loaded." But I didn't mean to
or don't mean to dismiss these tales or argue that they are inappropriate for children. In
fact, the Grimms' so-called fairy tales and all the folk tales gathered in the nineteenth
century as well as in the twentieth and twenty-first are vital for our understanding of
childism, and we should continue to study them, use them, and create new stories based
on what they communicate about child abuse and abandonment. The Grimms' tales are
also reminders that childism is world-wide, not only part of American culture, and one of
the reasons we continue to tell the Grimms' tales and other folk and fairy tales is that they
remind us what we have done to our children and to ourselves in the course of our
civilizing processes. To keep telling the the Grimms' tales -- and other canonical and
traditional tales -- as they are without questioning and changing them and encouraging
children to appropriate them according to their needs, howeveer, will only further
childism. The answer to childism demands critical soul-searching and a radical grasp of
the nature of authoritarianism and narcissism. In raising and teaching children we must

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educate ourselves and change our pedagogical practices. On a cultural level in the realm
of storytelling, we must exploit the deficit of traditional tales such as the Grimms' tales
for the benefit of children, their creativity, and their critical skills.
In my own work with teaching artists at the Children's Theatre Company of
Minneapolis I have made the following suggestions as guidelines for our collaboration
with teachers and children in the classes in which we tell the Grimms' tales and other
stories:
1) We must try to understand how we are complicit in childism and acknowledge that we
are living and working in a society that does not cater to the developmental needs of
children. This does not mean that we must confess mea culpa and atone for sins. It simply
means that we must be attentive to the children and their stories as best we can and try to
understand their individual needs as best we can. It also means that we must be conscious
of how we at times may be imposing our will on the children.
2) We must find diverse ways to let the children's stories breathe.
3) We must help children hone their art not just because we want them to become artists
and to create beautiful stories, but also because we want them to be effective with their
art. All art is political, whether we are conscious of this or not. To tell a story is always a
political act, a socially symbolic act, no matter what the speaker is conveying. A story is
an intervention into ongoing conflicts and struggles. It offers a narrative perspective. It
intervenes in traditional dialogues and challenges belief systems. And of course, little
stories are always challenging master narratives. Little stories have just as much right to
be heard as master narratives.

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4) By respecting the stories that children create and encouraging them to learn about
different perspectives, we help them sharpen their critical and creative skills.
5) We must recognize that we do not have to address their abuse directly. They know it.
They feel it. Their artful stories can be an effective way to confront their problems. Their
discussions, for instance, of "Hansel and Gretel" can help them learn about the
motivations of adults and child abandonment. Their discussions about the arbitrary power
of gods can enable them to understand authoritarianism and to understand how belief
systems are foisted on them.
6) We can never be neutral and should not be neutral when topics such as abuse,
abandonment, and social justice arise in the course of a teaching situation or session. This
does not mean that we are to impose our ideas on children, but we must somehow,
through our own stories, communicate to children that there is no such thing as neutrality
and that safeguarding the rights of children is one of the highest priorities any society
should have and maintain. Social justice can only be reached by speaking out civilly in
public places and guaranteeing that all voices are heard.
7) Finally, we should all try to recall the enlightening tales of the Brothers Grimm,
Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen that give us courage to dispel the magic spells
of our present religious, educational, and political organizations. We must be able to
listen to and to speak with children then they say kings are not wearing any clothes.

Endnotes

Ana Mara Shua, Quick Fix: Sudden Fiction, trans. Rhonda Dahl Buchanan, illustr. Luci Mistratov (Buffalo, NY: White Pine Press,
2008): 164.
2

Alice Miller, The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting, Trans. Andrew Jenkins (New York: W. W.
Norton, 2005.
3

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).