A child who has once been pleased with a tale likes, as a rule, to have it retold in almost the same words, but this should not lead parents to treat printed fairy stories as formal texts .  It is always much better to tell a story than read it out of a book, and, if a parent can produce what, in the actual situation of the time and the child, is an improvement on the printed text, so much the better . A charge made against fairy tales is that they harm the child by frightening him or making him sad thinking . To prove the latter, one would have to show in a controlled experiment that children who have read fairy stories were more often sorry for cruelty than those who had not . As to fears, there are, I think, some cases of children being dangerously terrified by some fairy story . Often, however, this arises( 出现 )from the child having heard the story once . Familiarity with the story by repetition turns the pain of fear into the pleasure of a fear faced and mastered . There are also people who object to fairy stories on the grounds that they are not objectively true, that giants, witches, two - headed dragons, magic carpets, etc do not exist ; and that, instead of being found of the strange side in fairy tales, the child should be taught to learn the reality by studying history . I find such people, I must stay so peculiar( 奇怪的 )that I do not know how to argue with them . If their cases were sound, the world should be full of mad men attempting to fly from New York to Philadelphia on a tick or covering a telephone with kisses in the belief that it was their beloved girl - friend . No fairy story ever declared to be a description of the real world and no clever child has ever believed that it was .