The paper examines structural paradigms for the analysis of narrative drawn from Levi-Strauss, Propp and Piaget. It shows that all are successful in differentiating between the stories freely told by children of different age levels ranging from 2 to 12 years. The susceptibility of these idiosyncratic stories to such structural analysis implies that children are increasingly socialized into patterns of public legend and mythology over this age period. Children’s fantasy stories are not simply ‘projective’ they are forms of socialization.