Of eco-friendly pigs and wise wolves

When Archana Bhide was growing up, Goldilocks was a fair-haired innocent who stumbled into an empty home belonging to three bears, partook of their porridge, broke a chair, slept in their beds—and fled when they returned home.
But for Bhide’s little daughter Avani, the story is incomplete . Reason: Goldilocks never went back to her victims, apologised for creating the mess, learnt how to rebuild a chair or thanked the three bears for their kindness.
Avani, who was read the brandnew version of the classic fairytale may or may not know that it was her mother who recreated it with the help of educationists at the Early Childhood Association. Collectively, they turned Goldilocks and the Three Bears into Goldilocks and the Three Magic Words to teach children the importance of saying ‘sorry’ , ‘thank you’ and ‘please’ . That’s the chief aim of this movement of parents and teachers: creating “fractured fairytales ” to inculcate important values that the old fairytales keep out.
“The idea is to see fairytales not as written in stone but as lumps of clay,” says Rhonda Divecha, a professor at Nirmala Niketan, who presented a paper on “fractured fairytales ” and “bibliotherapy” at the National Conference of the Early Childhood Association held in Mumbai last week. Divecha points out that while there are books that deal with issues like anxiety about the first day at school, the problem arises when a specific issue being faced at home is not matched with a book in the market. For instance, if a child displays anxiety about a new sibling, the story of Jack And The Beanstalk can be retold with Jack returning from the Giant’s home not with a pot of gold but a baby sister. “This way, the child will feel responsible towards the sibling,” she says.
It is this concept of teaching life lessons through fractured storytelling that the ECA is now focusing on by energising over 73 pre-schools , parents and eight NGOs working in the space of early child development. “Fairytales have a lasting impact on not only childhood but also adulthood . Most popular fairytales bear relevance to another time. For instance , ‘Ring-a-ring-o’ -roses ’ was written during the plague of London while the concept of the evil stepmother existed when women used to die during childbirth. Such ideas may not always relate to the sociogeopolitics of our times,” says Swati Popat Vats, president of ECA.
Vats says that during her work with pre-schoolers , she found a strain of common grievances: sibling rivalry , separation anxiety, aggression and sociability issues which manifested variously in bed-wetting , withdrawal , anger or fear. Such issues, she says, can be appropriately addressed if parents and teachers actively tweak well-known stories.
During one of her sessions, Vats asked a group of children what they thought of the wolf’s motive in the Three Little Pigs. “First they said the wolf wanted to eat the pigs but after I told them that he wanted, in fact, to tell them something, they started thinking,” she says. Slowly, the discussion moved to the materials the pigs used to build their homes, which ones were safe for living and which could have a less harmful impact on the environment.
“We discussed how the straw house could be blown down and how the wood house, besides killing trees, could catch fire. We all agreed that a brick house was best for the pigs and the environment,” she says. That’s how, with inputs from the kids, the story of the The Three Little Pigs Love the Earth came about—here , the wolf goes to each pig’s house and tells him about the environmental cost of his dwelling.
For Snehal Maydeo, a mother who attended a fractured fairytales workshop , the concepts have allowed her to gain an insight into her children’s minds. “When I was retelling the story of Aladdin And The Magic Lamp, I asked them what they would wish for. My younger son said he wanted his schoolbus to have wings that would bring home earlier and give him more play time. These are things I would have not known by simply asking him,” she says.
Perhaps then, fractured fairytales might just be a way to reach the fairytale ending that a generation fed on aggression, violence and frustration is in need of.