Fairy tales add a needed dimension of life in order for children to exercise their imagination. Fortunate is the child raised in an environment of books and reading, and how well I recall those earliest stories from Mother Goose and the Brothers Grimm, Hans Brinker, Black Beauty, Snow White and so many more. Even Henry Thoreau mentions Cinderella.

Granted many fairy tales and nursery rhymes had very dark beginnings before they became suitable for children. But as they evolved over time many of these became stories of magic and enchantment often with a beautiful moral important to the instruction of children.

Much of what we hold on to in the realm of fantasy as adults has its earliest beginning from the fairy tales of childhood. We are loath to give up beliefs in fairies and all those things belonging to the domain of childhood. In many cases the beliefs do not change in adulthood, but take on other forms as a compromise with reality.

While stories of magic and witchcraft apart from those contained in the Bible are anathema to many churches, I continue to believe Halloween and Santa should be fun and the domain of children, just as with the stories by J. K. Rowling.

At the time of its introduction a news item read, “The age of Potter VI officially dawned today as millions of fans from sweaty New York to chilly Australia got their hands on ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’ and began the darkest of J.K. Rowling’s fantasy novels.”

I commend Rowling for bringing a world of imagination and fantasy to children, for the great encouragement she is giving to children causing them to want to read. And while I don’t know, it would not surprise me to learn she owes a debt to the Bible and early Sunday School lessons for Harry Potter. Apart from the history and lessons clearly intended for adult readers, the Bible is replete with the stories of demons and witches, conjurors and sorcerers, of enough magic and fantasy to fire and encourage any child’s imagination.

Having been born into the age of radio long before TV in homes, children of my era had the benefit of all those great radio shows that required and inspired imagination. Reading and radio— a magical combination that gave free rein to our imagination. To read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn is to involve yourself in the world of imagination the peculiar domain of children Sam Clemens so well understood, and had the rare genius to communicate. Harper Lee certainly understood the importance of books to Jem and Dill, and emphasized this in To Kill A Mockingbird.

The old radio programs like Let’s Pretend along with Terry and the Pirates and a host of others had most of us children tuned in. But there were also programs like I Love a Mystery, Inner Sanctum, and The Whistler that drew children into a darker world of imagination.

Admittedly, many fairy tales, radio programs, and children’s books of my time included a large amount of violence, of murder and mayhem. But the visual element made so graphic in films and TV were, apart from some illustrations, lacking, which left us largely to our imagination, and it was the stimulation of imagination required that among other things made my generation the last of the real readers and writers in America, primarily because TV being a passive media simply cannot compete with books and those old radio programs when it comes to exercising one’s imagination.

However, it should not surprise anyone that the visual stimulation of so much violence in “children’s programming” on TV and in video “games” causes great harm to children. And while my generation had Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny, the so-called “cartoons” of today are a virtual parade of violence far beyond what children used to be exposed to. And unlike the cartoons in the theaters of my time, TV spews a continual stream of violence into the homes across America. And the noise! This is why I seldom tune in the FOX news channel. This is one of the very worst offenders when it comes to mind-numbing, crashing, screaming, piercingly shrill noise the producers seem to believe is needed for viewers. Shouting and screaming at adults, the noise and babble of people talking over each other punctuated with station breaks to the accompaniment of noise that would sterilize frogs and salamanders 300 yards distant! One wonders what kind of audience such programmers are trying to attract? Perhaps they all grew up to the kind of piercingly shrill mind-numbing noise too many call “music.”

But when it comes to the power of graphics, and not just that of violence and pornography, this is a double edged sword. Charles Lamb in his essay Witches, And Other Night-Fears writes of a book in his father’s library History of the Bible in which there were several woodcuts. One of these depicted the conjuring forth of the last judge of Israel, the prophet Samuel, by the Witch of Endor. Of this picture Lamb writes, “I wish that I had never seen.” With the keen perception peculiar to his genius Lamb concludes, “Credulity is the man’s weakness, but the child’s strength.”

However, as Lamb continues to point out in his essay that woodcut haunted him all his life due to the strength of his “child’s credulity,” requiring his need of a night light from childhood on, of his words of admonition to parents not to leave their children alone in the dark “where there be monsters.” The child’s strength of credulity lends itself, as Lamb recognized, to both beauty and monsters. The harm of it in adulthood is to subscribe to harmful fantasies, to be gullible and easily taken in by the “fairy tales” of charlatans and scoundrels, and one can only wonder what Lamb would have to say of the monsters children face today, the graphic and all pervasive violence and perversion children are being made to endure today.

In a world seeming gone mad and intent on nuclear annihilation unless sanity is restored, there is a lot of comfort to be found in the old hymns I knew and sang as a child in my grandparent’s small church in Little Oklahoma. They brought me a lot of comfort in the very uncertain and dangerous world of WWII, one in which children needed all the help and encouragement, all the comfort and escape from grim reality they could find. And children continue to need things to stir their imagination and encourage them to read, those better things offering a source of escape and comfort in a world adults seem intent on making increasingly unfriendly and dangerous to children.