Stories with Morals:
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Since the beginning of time, adults have used stories with morals to educate children in right and wrong, good and bad, safe and unsafe.
Too often these days, stories exist only for their entertainment value. As a result, parents rely too much on rules, incentives and coercion to coax good behavior from their children.
We want that good behavior to come from within. A story with a moral can help. The moral says precisely what the child is supposed to learn!
Fables are the most well known stories with morals. Fables are usually very short stories featuring animals (or sometimes even inanimate objects) with human thoughts and needs. Aesop's Fables are probably the most famous.
India also has a rich history of stories with morals.
You can find fables all over the internet, but they're usually indexed by title! Isn't that silly? A fable's usefulness is in its moral, so that's how you'll find them displayed here.
Most fables were written many years ago, and so the lessons they teach can lack relevance. I'll try to limit my listings to stories with morals that resonate today.
Know also that Aesop lived in Greece over 2500 years ago, and most English translations were done over a century ago. The language can seem less than modern. I'll try to make the translations sound less dated.
My opinion is that the best way to use a fable is to read it yourself and then tell it to your child in your own words. Feel free to embellish it, to make it more of a story. Aesop's Fables can seem more like incidents than stories.
Elsewhere on this site you'll find my own moral stories. I call them Children's Behavior Books.
They're longer than fables, and while they don't have a traditional moral, each one has a clear message. A combination story and activity book, they're meant to help you help a child overcome a problem behavior. (See a list of the problem behaviors.)
- Appearances can be deceptive
- Beauty is only skin-deep
- Be prepared
- A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush
- Birds of a feather flock together
- Every man for himself
- Evil-wishes, like chickens, come home to roost
- Fair weather friends aren't worth much
- Liars can't be trusted
- Look before you leap
- Might makes right
- Mind your own business
- Necessity is the mother of invention
- No act of kindness is ever wasted
- One good turn deserves another
- An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure
- Pride goes before the fall
- Quality, not quantity
- Slow and steady wins the race
- United We Stand, Divided We Fall
- You are known by the company you keep
Learn why the most effective teaching stories don't have morals.
Read stories without morals to your children, then decide together what the moral should be!
Best Children's Books home.
