We all remember them.
The first books we were able to read, or which were read to us before we went to sleep, were stories that always had a happy ending.
“And they all lived happily ever after” was the sentence that ended many tales for children. Whether it was a lost shoe, a poisoned apple or a heartless witch, the stories always had a perfect ending, with all the problems sorted and a smile on everyone’s face. A prince or a hero always came out of nowhere to save the day. If not, there was always a magic carpet or a wand.
It is the same in movies for children. Earthquakes, tragedies and misfortune throughout the film, plague the protagonists but they always end up unhurt, with no psychological traumas and looking ahead to a bright future.
Children grow up thinking that everything can be resolved, no matter what the difficulty is. They believe that the good guys will always defeat the bad guys. They are led to understand that even the most difficult situation will work out well. And that even after the worst possible scenarios, everything will be fine in the end with no repercussions.
Reality is a different story. Real life is not what children find in fairy tales or films they watch. Reality and fairy tales are poles apart.
If children lose a shoe, their parents will have to buy them a new pair and probably scold them for being negligent because nobody will turn up at the door checking whether a shoe found on the beach at Ghadira fits. And if children eat a bad apple they end up visiting the bathroom several times and no prince will want to go anywhere near their lips.
I’ve always enjoyed reading, and I do remember that, as a child, I used to ask myself how come that all the stories I read – I used to love the Famous Five, Secret Seven and the Five Find-Outers – always finished on a good note. Maybe I was born cynical, so much so that the character I remember most in the Enid Blyton books was a Mr Presto – the man who never smiled. It was my first and only contact, as a young reader, with the realities of life.
The older I grew, the more I shunned books and films that gave an untrue picture of what life is all about. Today the books (and films) that end with everything sorted out leave me cold. They have nothing to do with reality.
The happy endings in fiction for adults probably cater for that sizeable portion of older people who enjoy books and films that finish with a couple holding hands while sitting on a beach looking at the bright sun setting below the clear blue sea. If it’s a film, it is accompanied by romantic music. These books and films are a form of escapism.
The difference lies in the fact that adults are supposedly more mature to know that what they read in books and watch on films is nowhere near what happens in real life. So while enjoying the book or movie, they know – or should know – that what is being described or depicted is fiction aimed to make people feel good for a short while. Once the book is read or the people leave the cinema, then it’s back to reality. At least for most of us, who do not daydream about lifestyles we can never achieve.
But the long-term negative impact of happy endings in all books and films for kids is far, far greater on the minds of the younger ones.
The fairy-tale style in books and movies for children give a distorted picture of what they have to deal with in their day-to-day life. Things can go wrong for them even when they are still at a tender age. There are times when they are disappointed or hurt with episodes in their life. And it is not always possible to patch things up; some events leave scars that remain there for years, perhaps forever.
When these ugly happenings take place when the mind is still developing, the negative effect is greater. Then these children get to read stories or watch films that all have happy endings and start thinking – why didn’t it happen to me too?
The impression they are getting from children’s fiction is that there are solutions to all problems, but the reality is otherwise, so when it hits them that their own episode will not have the happy ending that those kids had in the film or book, the trauma is even bigger.
If, by some sheer luck, children never experience a bad day when they are young, and continue to believe that life is like any fairy tale, once they become adults they will soon realise that the fantasy they were fed when they were young is not the reality they are living.
It’s like the shock they get when they understand that Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy do not exist, and that it was only an uncle dressed up in the red robe or a parent gingerly lifting the pillow to retrieve the lost tooth and replace it with a two-euro coin.
The argument, in reverse, is also valid for those characters that were invented to scare children, such as the Bogey Man or the Babaw, as we have it in Maltese. Why should we instil fear in our children just to keep them quiet? Do we think that they will sleep more soundly or more quickly if we tell them that, if they don’t, the Babaw will come to take them away?
To go back to the happy endings, some argue that childhood is the age of innocence and we should let children enjoy it while it lasts. When adults know that life can be so horrible, why should children be deprived of the possibility of thinking that life is one happy journey? They will get their chance to understand how tough life can be, they say.
But all this gives children a false sense of security that after darkness there is always light, when this is absolutely not the case.