Fairy tale and its meaning in a modern family

5 Abstract This thesis deals with fairy tale and its meaning and using in a modern family. The theoretical part focuses on definition of terms fairy tale and family and points on their characteristic signs and functions, briefly mentions development of fairy tale and family throughout history, points at fairy tale in a context of children's thinking and feeling and offers a psychological characteristics of four selected fairy tales. The empirical part applies both quantitative and qualitative methods of processing the data, which were obtained from a questionnaire that was answered by 135 people. Its purpose is to find out the most frequent form of contact of a child with fairy tales, to learn which person reads or tells fairy tales to a child the most often and to show which versions of fairy tales are most common among children. This thesis also analyses opinions of parents on meaning of fairy tales in a life of a child and family and defines the reasons which parents have for reading or nonreading of fairy tales. Using statistics methods, there were shown some significant differences between audiovisual and read/told form of a contact of children with fairy tales, differences were also shown between the groups of mothers and fathers in a frequencies of reading fairy tales to their children and it was..