Are fairy tales just too scary for children?

I AM surprised that a survey of millennials has found that muchloved traditional fairy tales are inappropriate, outdated and too scary for young children (Mail). When I studied French and German at university, I read many of the original versions of these stories. My favourite Brothers Grimm story was The Juniper Tree in which a woman decapitates her stepson, frames her daughter for the killing, feeds the little boy to his father and is eventually crushed to death by a millstone!

In the Charles Perrault version of Sleeping Beauty, the Prince’s mother is a cannibalistic ogress who ends up in a cauldron full of poisonous snakes. Children are able to differentiate between fiction and real life. They are not frightened or corrupted by fairy tales — we know they see far worse on the internet.

Fairy stories feed the imagination, open the mind to the joys of literature and offer a moral lesson that good is rewarded and evil punished. How sad that the woke generation seeks to deprive children of this rich heritage.

KENNETH MILLS, Hampton, Middlesex.

A PANTO has been cancelled because it was felt some of the characters’ names might offend and the wokes claim fairy tales are offensive and frightening. Are we really breeding a namby-pamby generation that protests about the slightest thing and feels anything that isn’t politically correct should be censored?

For goodness sake, lighten up.

KARL SHERIDAN, Holme-on-Spalding-Moor, E. Yorks.

WILL the demise of fairy tales include election manifestos?

ROD MITCHELL, Sudbury, Suffolk. WHAT about the Weetabix TV advert based on the three little pigs and the big bad wolf? In the fairy tale, the wolf fails to blow down the brick house and all three pigs are safe. But in the advert, he blows down all of the houses and eats the three little pigs.

JAMES WIGNALL, Accrington, Lancs.