Greed stories

Read half a dozen of these and the pattern is unmistakable. Knowing the pattern helps you pick the one that fits the week you have had.

Grabbing at a reflection

The character already has enough and loses it reaching for more. The Dog and the Shadow is five minutes and the purest example. The Milkmaid and Her Pail spends the money before it exists, and The Fox and the Grapes shows the sulk that follows.

Killing the goose

The character destroys the thing that was feeding them. The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs takes six minutes and is the one every adult can still quote. The Golden Touch of King Midas is the grand version for ages six to ten.

Keeping what you cannot use

The meanest kind, and often the most useful at home. The Dog in the Manger is ten minutes about refusing to share something you do not even want, and The Selfish Giant, retold from Oscar Wilde, turns the same idea into a garden and a wall.

A whole cluster here is about wishes, which is the cleanest way to show a child what wanting badly does to somebody. The Ridiculous Wishes is six minutes and very funny, which makes it the safest starting point. The Fisherman and His Wife is nine minutes of the same story told without jokes, from the Brothers Grimm.

Reading the funny one first and the Grimm one a week later is a genuinely good sequence, because the second lands harder once a child recognises the shape.

The treasure that turns out not to be

The Golden Nugget is seven minutes for ages six to ten and ends by deciding that the gold was the least interesting thing in the story. The Rich Man and the Tanner makes the same case in five minutes with no magic in it at all, which some children find more convincing.

The week before a birthday, after a row over a shared toy, or in the run-up to Christmas when the list is getting long. Pick a four or five minute fable rather than a long tale; the point is made faster and nobody feels lectured.

What not to do is name the culprit. If you read The Dog in the Manger and then say that is exactly what you did with the scooter, you have spent the story for nothing. Say nothing at all and read it again in a fortnight. Children are perfectly able to apply a fable to themselves, and they do it more honestly when nobody is watching them do it.

Two of these tales, The Fisherman and His Wife and Rumpelstiltskin, come from the Grimm collection first published in 1812; our guide to who the Brothers Grimm were gives the background if your child starts asking where stories come from.

Greed is a branch of hardship, and its twin is pride — the same forty-odd fables reshuffled around a different fault. Where greed wants to own things, pride wants to be admired for them.

Because so many of these are Aesop, Aesop’s fables is the fastest place to find more of the same length and tone. Traditionally placed in the sixth century BC, they are the shortest moral stories anyone has bettered, and this theme is where the sourest of them ended up.

If you would rather end the evening somewhere warmer, kindness is the obvious counterweight, and reading one fable from each is a better pairing than two from here. The last story of the night sets the tone a child falls asleep in, and forty minutes of people losing things is not the tone anybody wants.