Peanut Butter Post #2 (not actually about peanut butter)

Somewhat unrelatedly, what were your favorite books as a child? I loved most of all Harriet the Spy and Roald Dahl. In Harriet the Spy, which I first read at age 6, Harriet's diary notebook is discovered and her friends all turn against her and everything goes to shit and her parents take her to a psychologist. I'm here to tell you, it can be really isolating to be a little kid, and little-kid factions form and unform and there's a lot of psychological crap that goes on even for a six or seven year old. Harriet the Spy was like The Moviegoer for tots, a book where psychological angst becomes redemptive if rendered as a really good story. Mental pain exists, but it can go away, and it can be made entertaining and instructive, through writing.

Here you can read a New Yorker article about Roald Dahl, the not-nice man whose books adults have often been against. (Including Ursula LeGuin? Though, delightfully, Leguin calls a Dahl book "a tiny psychological fugue" for her daughter.) The article is by Margaret Talbot, who wrote the article about Mean Girls in the New York Times Magazine a few years ago, and so who knows about the anger and meanness that can lurk in the hearts of little girls. Talbot quotes Bettelheim on fairy tales:

Children need the dark materials of fairy tales because they need to make sense—in a symbolic, displaced way—of their own feelings of anger, resentment, and powerlessness. Children also benefit from learning about violence and brutishness in fairy tales, Bettelheim writes, for it counters the “widespread refusal to let children know that the source of much that goes wrong in our life is due to our natures—the propensity of all men for acting aggressively, asocially, selfishly.”

It is the "widespread refusal to let children know" that I am arguing, here, against.