Dragons, Stories and Your Children

I am enjoying Michael O’Brien’s book, A Landscape With Dragons: The Battle for Your Child's Mind. The opening portion provides a good description of the role of stories in moral formation, particularly distinguishing good and bad and facing the real fears of the world.

His overview of how Christianity shaped the patterns of older stories but this shaping influence has largely given way to the influence of paganism is very helpful for parents in thinking about books for their children. He argues that fear of “monsters” is not something to be ridiculed; rather, “It is a wise parent who recognizes the first awakenings of these mute dreads as the first buds of a spiritual faculty” (19). His own account of how his mother dealt with the fears of his childish fears is inspiring and instructive.

I have not completed the book, but his arguments thus far have much in common with those of C. S. Lewis (commented on previously here and here)

Here are a few more good quotes:

I want them to read plenty of stories in which there are dragons that act like dragons and meet a dragon’s end. (33)

Their interior life had need of the tales that inform them of their danger and instruct them at deep levels about the tactics of their enemy. It is good that our children fear dragons, for in the fearing, they can learn to overcome fear with courage. Dragons cannot be tamed, and it is fatal to enter into dialogue with them. The old stories have taught our children this. (33)

The imagination must be fed good food, or it will become the haunt of monsters. (33)

Vigen Guroian on Moral Guidance & Children

In Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination Guroian extols the place of classic stories in shaping the moral imagination. He laments the current state of affairs stating:

“Children need guidance and moral maps and they benefit immensely with the example of adults who speak truthfully and act from moral strength.

Our society is finding it difficult to meet these needs of children. Some well-meanign educators and parents seem to want to drive the passion for moral clarity out of children rather than use it to the advantage of shaping their character. We want our children to be tolerant, and we sometimes seem to think that a too sure sense of right and wrong only produces fanatics. Perhaps we have become so resigned to flailing about in the culture’s muddy waters of moral compromise and ethical obscurantism that it is hard for us to imagine other possibilities for out children.”

Imagination the Basis of Ethics, Worldview

David Mills' article, "Enchanting Children: Training Up a Child Requires a Well Formed Imagination" (from Touchstone) is a great resource for parents. He deals with several issues, primarily the importance of the imagination in shaping life.  He argues that the imagination shapes life more than the facts we know and that stoires are the key factor shaping our imaginations.  Therefore we ought to be very diligent in guarding what stories our children take in- e.g. limit television and read them good stories.  I agree wholeheartedly!

Here are some quotes.
On the importance of imagination Mills wrote:

We tend to rely, I think, too much on knowledge. Even if Johnny has memorized the Baltimore Catechism or the Westminster Confession, or even hundreds of verses of Scripture, if his imagination has been formed by the wider, secular culture, he will respond to temptations as a secularist, not as a Christian.

He will know that fornication is wrong and that intercourse is a gift reserved for marriage, but he will feel that it is a recreational activity to be enjoyed ... When he brings himself to temptation, his feelings are more likely to move him than his thoughts, and of course once he falls, his thoughts will start to change to fit his feelings.
...
Revulsion is a much better protection from the force of the passions than an intellectual understanding by itself. To feel “This is yucky” is not a final protection from sin, but it is better than thinking “This is wrong” but feeling “This is okay.” Lust offers the paradigmatic case (examples come quickly to mind), but this is true of pride, gluttony, envy, and all the rest, even sloth.

He encoourages avoiding the warped stories which cascade from the television and developing a family culture more oriented to reading.  He admits this will be difficult and will set you apart as odd in comparison with others.

But it is worth the effort. Hearing his father or mother read a good story forces the child to hear and begin to imagine stories he would not necessarily read himself, and it gives you another time to talk with him about the deeper things, without being overtly religious in the way that puts off so many children.

He continues:

Good stories read seriously and with enjoyment will help form a child’s imagination, and give it a shape it will never entirely lose, no matter what the child does when he grows older. But we would be foolish to rely on stories to do more than stories can. Wise Christian parents will immerse themselves and their children ever more deeply in the life of the Church, whose worship and teaching and charity and fellowship will be the most profound creator of the Christian imagination.


There they should meet Jesus. The world in which the child knows that Jesus is present is a world he will always live by, even in reaction and even when he convinces himself that it is an illusion. The well-formed imagination is a gift that keeps on giving.

...
As St. James pointed out, even the devils believe, in the sense that they know what the reality is (James 2:19). But they cannot imagine that the reality is good. They may know of God the Father, but to them such Fatherhood feels like domination and oppression, because their imaginations are so completely corrupted. They do not hear “Thus says the Lord” as “Here is the antidote for the poison that is killing you,” but as “Down, vermin slaves.” Think of Uncle Andrew in The Magician’s Nephew, who hears Aslan’s kind words only as a threatening growl.

C. S. Lewis on the Importance of Imagination

Just yesterday I came across this quote from a letter by C. S. Lewis. It captures a truth important to me about reading to children, and the sorts of things they need exposure to. Of course Lewis also argues elsewhere that stories themselves have a keen power in pointing us to Christ. So awakening the imagination is also part of pointing one to Christ.

“Minto reads him the Peter Rabbit books every evening, and it is a lovely sight. She read very slowly and he gazes up into her eyes which look enormous through her spectacles – what a pity she has no grandchildren. Would you believe it, the child has never been read to nor told a story in his life? Not that he is neglected. He has a whole time Nurse (an insufferable semi-lady scientific woman with a diploma from some Tom-fool nursing college), a hundred patent foods, is spoiled, and far too expensively dressed: but his poor imagination has been left without any natural food al all. I often wonder what the present generation of children will grow up like. . . . They have been treated with so much indulgence yet so little affection, with so much science and so little mother-wit. Not a fairy tale nor a nursery rhyme.”

- Quoted in Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis, 217). (New York: HaperCollins, 2005), 234-35.