Sure, I get that people learn lessons from stories or parables, if you will. And I get that reading your kids fairy tales is a hell of a lot more enjoyable than explaining the dangers of taking candy from a stranger in excruciating detail. However, at the same time, I do believe that:

1 – Fairytales go just a bit overboard. I mean, have you read some of these things? They were clearly created by some fairly disturbed individuals.

2 – People today take fairy tales for granted. Parents question video games, movies, TV, and even comic books, but somehow never even think to question these so-called classic stories. I’d feel better about it if people even thought twice about it, even if they decided to go ahead and use them anyway.

Humans learn to extract lessons from stories. They learn to because we tell them stories, and then the lesson. (this also works vise versa)

These fairytales are not bed times stories, their parables.

You can take anything out of context and skew it any direction.

More about the first line:
How do you teach a little kid to not take candy from a stranger?
You: “Don’t take candy from a stranger”
Child’s Response: “Why?”
You: “Because they might kidnap you, lock you in a room, and …”
I’m not even going to finish writing that out.
I’d rather explain Snow White.

The reason people read fairy tales to their children is because, believe it or not, they make up an elaborate tapestry of classic literature. They’re short, comprehensible, and have an entertainment value to them that modern children’s literature seems to lack. Are they sometimes violent or frightening or tragic? Yes, but that’s exactly what makes them thrilling. Every child gets a thrill out of hearing a horror story every now and then. They want to hear the version of the story where the mutilated mermaid would rather throw herself overboard and wait to die than kill her prince. It’s far more passionate than the watered-down Disney retelling where Ariel saves the prince from some hussy-woman’s devil magic and they all live happily ever after. If you think children are so delicate and morally-receptive that they can’t handle a simple fairytale, then by all means, don’t read them any. However, MY children will get to hear how Bluebeard’s wife stumbled upon the corpses of all her husband’s murdered spouses, and how the Egyptian swan princess was raped by the King of the Marshes, delivering in a lotus flower a daughter that changed from a beautiful, blood-thirsty savage by day to a melancholy monster by night. After all, a bedtime story should be something worth listening to, not a patronizing lesson on moral values. That’s what church is for.