It seems to me that the stunning success of the atheist bus campaign has gone to Richard Dawkins's head, for I can't imagine what else can have made him think that it was a good decision for him to now set his sights on to taking down another cultural scourge that threatens the well-being of innocent children: fiction.

According to the Daily Telegraph, Dawkins's next piece of important work will be aimed at helping children differentiate between mythic thinking and science. While Dawkins claims to love Philip Pullman, he also expresses concern that "…looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's something for research."

Research? I do find the idea of conducting a longitudinal study in which a group of children are isolated from anything imaginative rather amusing. But in his apparent conviction that children are incapable of separating what they read about in stories from reality, Dawkins sounds to me not unlike the fundamentalist Christian mums who tried to get Roald Dahl's The Witches banned from my primary school for fear that it would undermine what their kids had learned at Sunday school rather than acknowledging that sometimes, stories are just stories.

Though they are admittedly not as smart as adults, kids are remarkably good at separating truth from fiction when it comes to what they read or hear. In fact, I believe (from my limited knowledge of developmental psychology) that getting a grasp on narrative and understanding the separations between fiction and fact is an important part of the development of the parts of the brain that one day can be devoted to good rational, atheist thoughts. Dawkins wants to tell kids to "always look for evidence", which is fine – of course, one might argue that the ancient myth-makers who drafted sacred texts that some people still (unfortunately) regard as important were doing that themselves in a crude way and should be considered important in the context of learning about how to think.

Dawkins cites his childhood exposure to fairy tales as influencing his views on the issues, so I feel justified in citing mine: as the progeny of a mixed-faith union between a physicist and a psychologist, my siblings and I grew up being indoctrinated with firm belief in the power of science to explain everything. A fun Sunday afternoon would see us all gathered round the kitchen table doing double-blind experiments to see if we could taste the difference between brand-name and generic breakfast cereals, watching a documentary about Richard Feynmann, maybe reading a bit of James Randi. Sometimes it all felt, I daresay, a bit insidiously rational. But being aware of the need for balance, my parents also made sure we got healthy doses of fiction, including one of my perennial favourites, a children's edition of the Bible that cut out all of the boring litanies of offspring and just focused on the exciting, slightly ludicrous, stories.

Most non-believing parents would testify, I believe, that it is perfectly possible to bring kids up to be sceptical, inquisitive and rational while also allowing them to freely engage in the flights of fancy that fanciful stories prompt them to take. Any little girl who has actually gone out and smooched a frog, as Dawkins seems to fear might be the outcome of too much exposure to fairy tales, shouldn't be regarded as a victim of child abuse or deprivation from rationality; she should be congratulated for her precocious aptitude for the trial-and-error approach to scientific experimentation.