Fueling independence at an early age

Let children figure things out for themselves. That’s what the experts say. According to a new study from the Journal of Child and Family Studies, toddlers who have greater autonomy to perform tasks on their own showed a type of higher thinking.This may not come as a surprise to most parents, but it is certainly a good reminder to those of us who have to hold back – to prevent ourselves from swooping in to show our children that the square peg doesn’t fit in the round hole.The benefits of allowing children to explore are well documented. But allowing kids to explore with their imagination is equally important.  Young children have free reign to embark upon a journey of the imagination through books – particularly fairy tales.Entertained by death-defying quests, roused by the injustices of evil stepmothers, encouraged by the eventual victory of beloved heroes and heroines, children not only fuel their imagination when reading fairy tales. They intrinsically gain moral guidance.In Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, Anthony Esolen points out the intuitive value of reading fairy tales, which focus on characters that “dwell in a moral world, whose laws are as clear as the law of gravity. In the folk tale, good is good and evil is evil, and the former will triumph and latter will fail. This is not the result of the imaginative quest. It is rather its principle and foundation.”