Friday, October 16, 2015

At Willow Web-Scary Folklore: Motivating Children's Behaviors


"Baba Yaga and Vasilisa"- Milo Neuman

Today I'm posting over at The Willow Web as part of Amy's Halloween series! Hop on over and join the discussion about the ways that modern parents still use folklore to motivate their children to behave-whether threatening monsters who will punish or benevolent characters who reward. We'd love to hear from you-what supernatural creatures did your parents threaten you with? What do you think of using folklore in parenting? 


7 comments:

  1. Not me, but my sister. Baba Yaga. You might have noticed from my surname that my family is from Eastern Europe, though not Russia. My younger brother said if Baba Yaga turned up in his room he would throw his toy guitar at her, but it scared my older sister. Me, I don't recall any such threats at me. ;-)

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    1. Haha I like the idea of throwing a toy guitar at Baba Yaga to keep her away-it's sort of like the logic of Clara killing the King of Mice by throwing her shoe at his head. It's interesting to see how children all respond to these threats completely differently. It's sort of like the story I share in the post of the little boy attempting to guard his tooth from the Tooth Fairy by setting up his lego men! But it does seem to fit into the world of fairy tales...actions don't really have to make sense for them to get results, the important thing is to take action at all

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    2. I would probably have interviewed Baba Yaga and asked her about her house on chicken legs. I was a nerdy little thing, even then!

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  2. If you strip the lessons, the tales/boogeymen creatures are actually used to blackmail children into obedience and submission to parents/adults' authority. Still you can't help but love these tales, and it does warn you that the world is not always a safe place.

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    1. That's definitely one way to look at it-I think especially for those of us who grew up without parents threatening monsters on us, it seems cruel. I think it could depend a lot on how the parents handle it. But your second point is totally true-and it's interesting that when Baba Yaga/the Boogeyman are concerned, parents are "powerless" to stop them. Very different from typical parenting today where we assure kids that they are safe and we will always protect them, although that really isn't a promise that parents can make-some things *are* out of their control. Children today tend to view their parents as capable of/not scared of anything, I wonder if this is something that has changed culturally? Did children always see their parents as invincible?

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  3. I have read that there are scary creatures who are devised to make sure that children don't get into dangerous situations, eg "Don't go down to the river alone, there's a monster who lives there" or "Don't go into that part of the forest, you'll be eaten by th big bad wolf" or whatever.

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    1. That makes much more sense. The most danger we have to warn kids about today are not to cross the street by themselves and even then they're rarely alone but it was a much more dangerous world back then. Parents had reason to scare kids about going to rivers/forests alone because, worst case scenario, they really could die! Unlike the Strewelpeter stories that came later threatening children with extreme pain or death for sucking their thumbs or being rebellious-cruel punishments that don't fit the crime at all.

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