The healing power of stories: How to create therapeutic fairy tales for children and adults

The article examines the potential application of fairy-tale therapy by educators, specialists in the socionomic sphere, and parents to provide psychological and educational support to children. The article aims to reveal various aspects of therapeutic fairy tale writing aimed at an individual’s psychological and pedagogical assistance. To achieve the research objectives, several theoretical methods were utilized: content analysis of both Ukrainian and foreign scholarly works to identify effective methods for crafting therapeutic fairy tales; a typological approach to delineate strategies for developing storytelling skills for therapeutic purposes; the method of translating theoretical concepts into the practice of composing original therapeutic fairy tales; and the examination, analysis, and synthesis of specialized psychological and pedagogical literature. It is emphasized that therapeutic fairy tales help to correct a child’s behaviour, and some psychological deviations reveal creativity and instil moral values. In addition, therapeutic fairy tales heal the soul and touch the most important human senses. It was concluded that the uniqueness of telling therapeutic fairy tales as a method of practical psychology and pedagogy is that it has no age restrictions and, secondly, it can be applied to people who develop "normally" and people with special needs.