When the world around our children is full of anxieties and questions, we all need a space for sincere conversations. A space where we can safely and clearly talk about feelings, experiences, fears, and hopes.
A fairy tale becomes such a space — gentle and safe. A fairy tale helps a child understand themselves, the people around them, and the world. The child learns to live through difficult events, empathize, seek answers, and gradually build inner resilience.
About the project
The Ridni Foundation team turned to the fairy tale as a psychological and pedagogical tool capable of healing, teaching, and inspiring.
Fairy Tale Creation is a method of describing and conveying important experiences through fairy tale images and situations. This format makes it easy to show the hero’s journey: from encountering obstacles to overcoming them, from uncertainty to a hard-won victory.
Fairy tale as a tool
A fairy tale speaks the language of metaphors, images, and imagination. It allows one not only to name a problem but also to see ways to solve it.
Working with a fairy tale helps a child to:
Develop emotional intelligence, imagination, and thinking.
Process traumatic experiences.
Learn new ways of interacting with the world.
Strengthen inner resources and resilience.
The project united hundreds of specialists from all over Ukraine who learned to:
Create their own fairy tales using a special methodology on topics relevant to children — fear, loss, war, hope, friendship, dreams.
Adapt fairy tales according to the child’s age, individual characteristics, and needs.
Use fairy tales and illustrations in their daily work.
Our achievements
✨ 2 training courses on fairy tale creation were organized and completed by 50 specialists, whose fairy tales were included in printed publications and who formed a professional community.
✨ 2 printed and 1 electronic collection of original fairy tales were published. The circulation of the first collection is 500 copies, and the circulation of the second is 1000 copies.
✨ The books were distributed to 150 institutions: schools, libraries, and children’s spaces across Ukraine.
✨ A collection of original illustrations for working with children was developed.
✨ Methodical materials were prepared to help specialists integrate fairy tales into the educational process.
📖 Fairy Tale Creation is the transformation of one’s own experiences into support tools, which we have compiled into two collections.
Fairy Tale Collection “The Tale of the Helmet /When the Day Comes”
“The Tale of the Helmet /When the Day Comes” is not just a collection of fairy tales. It is a space for adults who lived through the beginning of the full-scale invasion and were involved in working with children. These stories convey the experience of working with children and an attentiveness to their emotions — all of which helps young readers feel supported and safe next to an adult.
The collection is the result of the creative and therapeutic work of practicing psychologists who successfully completed the fairy tale therapy course, organized by the Ridni Foundation under the professional guidance of trainer and supervisor Lyudmila Pidlypna.
The collection features 12 unique stories: from prose to rhymed tales. They are written for children and adults, so that everyone can find a plot that resonates with them. Each fairy tale is unique in its content, style, and range of themes and emotions.
“The Tale of the Helmet /When the Day Comes” is an engaging, useful, and experimental tool for psychologists, psychotherapists, educators, and parents. It is a key to a gentle dialogue with children who are experiencing the traumatic events of war. Each story can not only be read but also acted out and retold — finding new meanings each time that restore calm, trust, and the opportunity to talk about difficult topics.
Fairy Tale Collection “The Helpers’ Tales”
Throughout 2025, the Ridni team, in partnership with World Vision International, implemented the project “Resilience Resources in Educational Communities.” One of its stages was the course “Fairy Tale Creation with Ridni” — a space for creativity, reflection, and care, where specialists from helping professions learned to create therapeutic fairy tales as a tool for supporting children and adults in difficult times.
During the two-day online intensive, educators, psychologists, and social workers mastered the methodology of creating therapeutic fairy tales, wrote their own stories, and received professional feedback from the trainer Olena Petrushkevych.
Fairy tales are a valuable tool in the work of everyone who works with children. For children, listening to or reading fairy tales is not only captivating but also therapeutic — quality stories allow them to process their experiences in a healthy way and draw important conclusions.
During the “Fairy Tale Creation with Ridni” course, 30 unique stories were created, and 15 of them became part of the illustrated collection “The Helpers’ Tales.” These are stories full of warmth, attentiveness, and space for dialogue with children. They are supplemented by 8 narrative illustrations — not just drawings, but entire worlds that open up a field for fantasies and reflections.
This collection is a tool for adults who want to help children process emotions, learn to share dreams, and overcome anxieties. The book has already been received by 120 institutions in various corners of Ukraine — and now these fairy tales are giving children warmth, peace, and the feeling that there is someone nearby who hears and understands them.
When our grandchildren ask what we were doing during the war, the best answer will be: we were creating books of fairy tales.Because even in the darkest of times, stories can bring hope and light.
