The Stories We Tell Our Children

21 Mar, 2026

There is a German TV-show, “Biene Maja”, from the 70’s that I loved as a child and re-watched with my daughter. Maja is a curious bee living on a beautiful meadow, experiencing all kinds of adventures. Listening to an audio version of a contemporary Biene Maja story, I was struck by the stark difference half a century has had on how the story is told. I believe this reflects a deep cultural shift that is focused on how much freedom we grant our children and what kinds of stories we tell them (and therefore ourselves) about the world.

Unlike when I was a kid, my daughter and I now streamed the old Biene Maja episodes which allowed me to actually see them from the beginning and in neat order. The first two episodes struck me: It all starts with Maja hatching. All the little bees leave their combs and are greeted by a friendly mother-like teacher figure. Maja, however, keeps inside, immediately starting a discussion on why she shouldn’t actually remain where she is. The teacher first tries to win over Maja by arguing that all bees do it that way. After this does not convince the little bee, the teacher resolves the issue by force. The bees are subsequently taught about the dangers of the outside world with Maja being outstandingly curious and smart, asking lots of intelligent questions – which is not liked by the teacher. It all becomes quite dramatic after Maja gets punished for her defiant curiosity by getting imprisoned in some kind of holding cell overnight. Maja is understandably furious at this, manages to exit by taking advantage of the incredibly stupid guards and henceforward lives outside, on the meadow on her own, accompanied at some point by a friend, Willy. She is the classical drop-out kid going it alone, following her curiosity without compromise. This leads her into many adventures and dangers, marked by, among others, a violin-playing spider, a praying mantis, a bird, and a human – all want to eat Maja, except for the human who wants to kill a friend of hers anyhow, a fly. The bee state does not appear in most episodes; Maja is a true outcast.

In the contemporary audio version, however, things are quite different: Here too, Maja lives on the meadow, however the whole bee state appears in almost every episode. And it does so in a strikingly friendly manner; Cassandra, the teacher, is all nice and helpful as is even the queen. If you know the older TV-version, this shift is unbelievable. Maja’s role is to help the state whenever she can, making the bees aware of potential incoming threats etc. And the nature of those threats mark the next striking difference: In one episode, Maja believes to have encountered a bear quite close to the bee-hive, prompting her to warn the queen who in turn evacuates the whole hive. Eventually they find out it was a teddy bear. For a brief moment the listener is made to worry about whether Maja gets into trouble - but no, the queen thanks her for her alertness and deems the whole thing a good drill. In fact, whatever seems to be a threat in order to create some (mild form of) suspense turns out to be a false alarm or some actually kind insects acting maliciously only for a brief period of time until Maja solves the riddle. Quite a contrast to the old versions where for instance a snail and her children are stuck on an island that has caught fire with the only exit being blocked by the spider, laughing hysterically at the snail’s dilemma. There is no evil in the contemporary version of the meadow.

Two shifts become visible that I subsequently encountered time and again when comparing older (think 60s to 80s) children’s stories with contemporary ones:

1. Authority shifts from being painted as stupid, laughable or even malicious to friendly, kind, wise, and basically good.
2. Evil ceases to be.

I could go on and on to give examples, another favorite of mine being the “Räuber Hotzenplotz”, a story by Ottfried Preußler, starring not one but two formidable villains and an extremely funny portrayal of a really stupid policeman: So Hotzenplatz terrorizes the small town since quite some time when he breaks into the garden of our protagonist’s grandmother, threatens her at gun-point and steals her beloved coffee grinder. The policeman, “Wachtmeister Dimpfelmoser” loses himself in bureaucratic nonsense, which is why the two grandchildren, Seppel and Kasperl, take on things by themselves, setting up a trap to find Hotzenplot’s hidden cave in the forest. They succeed, yet Hotzenplotz ends up outsmarting the two kids and kidnaps them. Now things go really wild: Hotzenplotz likes to own a slave but sees no need to own two of them. What does he do? He trades one of them against a hefty dose of snuff tobacco with an evil wizard. Hence one of the boys has to dwell in Hotzenplot’s cave, making him dinner, cleaning his shoes and being fed mouldy (!) bread while the other one has a slightly better time in the wizard’s castle, peeling mountains of potatoes because this is the one thing the wizard does not get done by means of his magic. It is a great story; when I first read it to my daughter, I was completely hooked. It also quite obviously contains real evil and mocks authority. You will have to read a lot of contemporary children’s stories to find anything at least closely resembling this kind of terror.

Now, why the shift? One idea appeared to me while listening to a podcast interview with Chriss Sacca who talks about how he spent his youth roaming around with other kids, completely unsupervised by any adults and what ...what damaging effects he thinks the lack of this freedom has on today's youth.¹ It seems like back in the days of Räuber Hotzenplotz and the Biene Maja TV-show, children actually were allowed or put into potentially much more risky situations. It does make a lot of sense to then impose some intuition about evil on them. There are threats, there are other people with really bad intentions – so beware! Today, things have changed: Kids, for the most part, do not spend time outside on their own, at least when they are younger – and are basically told stories about how good and fine everything is. I find it harder to make sense of this one. But then I thought of this thing where oftentimes you only have to say and stress things if you do not really believe them. While I don’t think that parents in the 70s believed naively in the world being a place of pure goodness, they seem to all in all have perceived it at least as safe enough to let their kids go out on their own. Parents today, on the other hand, quite evidently deem the world outside very risky, so much so that they do not let their kids go out unsupervised – but, in this weird twist, tell them and themselves that actually all is fine and well. This would mean that we find ourselves in a time and cultural setting that is dominated by fear and risk-averseness and therefore, as some kind of countering measure, brings about children’s stories focused on a harmonic, safe world without evil. So in a way, today’s culture has gotten pretty childish, afraid of the world outside, soothing itself by telling its own children fake-stories about how good and well everything is.