Back

If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales

Cecilie Conrad·Aug 1, 2021· 2 minutes

Einstein apparently said the following. “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”

If we read stories for our children in order to raise their IQ, it is very sad. And wrong.

But if we want to open the world to our children, show them the nuances and options, make life magic and interesting, I fully agree.

Stories are of extreme value, all of them. Every narrative element will feed our existence with options, our filters with nuances, our perspective with structure. The more stories we know, the more dreams we can and will pursue, the more energy we have for thinking, the more nuances we understand, the more wholehearted our tolerance, the more precise our values. This is true for the old tales from ancient Greece and the classic cartoons from the 80’es, any story that will keep you interested long enough to read it has something to offer.

It is one of the key problems with schooling, especially compulsive state schooling: There will be a curriculum. Even in a free, local, barefoot hippie school, there will (most likely) be a teacher or leader to pick a curriculum. “Everyone has to read this book.”

I am highly educated, and I am a true bookworm. I have read thousands and thousands of pages of written text, I love the classics and the crime novels, I love the cartoons, the movies, and the audiobooks, I treasure children’s books, and I love mythology. I would say any genre, but I do not really like SciFi, and I am not into scary books. But that’s just me. I know they have high value, and maybe there will be a time.

Even being this reading person, reading and reading for more than 30 years, NOTHING can make me read a book I don’t want to read, a book that does not talk to me, that will not catch my immediate attention and interest.

Why would I ask my children to force themselves through something that does not talk to them instead of letting them read whatever is right for them at the moment?

It is very hard to take good pictures of dolphins, especially if you are at the same time trying just to enjoy the moment and save some hours in the …Read more
The Julømpiade is on! For those who do not speak Danish, this word is a mix of Christmas and The Olympics. A tradition we started last year to do som…Read more
Isla Magdalena was our Christmas walk. We like to go for a walk at a beautiful place on the 24th of December. We walked over the dunes to the pacific…Read more
I have been asked if I am looking forward to completing my 365 challenge so I am off the hook of writing a story every day. It is a good question, an…Read more
“Where the Crawdads Sing” is a great novel; I greatly enjoyed it. Here, in Puerto Aldolfo Lopez Mateo, the landscape takes me right there, to the mar…Read more
A long, dusty road. We literally saw a Roadrunner. Like in the cartoons! It must be one of the highlights of the day. Such a great comment on the des…Read more
Just get out there. On the water. In the water. That is the recommendation from everyone we met living on boats for everyone else. And it is very tru…Read more
Sometimes, these peaceful days, even with all the adventure, are hard to describe. It all seems a bit banal when jotting it down in my journal. But r…Read more
In La Ventana, it made a lot of sense to get up at five in the morning to enjoy the sunrise from pitch dark over extreme beauty to bright daylight. E…Read more