The examples you cite do not strike me as the best way, so I will continue to worry about this.
Learning from a story crafted by experienced people, sometimes encompassing many generations of experience and wisdom, is so often superior to having to learn from one's own myopic, incomplete experience in the real world. This is, in some sense, the whole point of having and telling stories.
> To which I say: what’s the rush? They’ll learn fear and death and worry soon enough.
The thing is that these fairy stories at a pre school level give children some tools to use when they experience the real horrors you are talking about. If kids go into rape and shootings blind then it can be really disturbing, and leads to mental health issues and suicides. If they have experience of internalising trauma through the safety of stories then these experiences have been proven to be processed much more effectively.
The examples you cite do not strike me as the best way, so I will continue to worry about this.
Learning from a story crafted by experienced people, sometimes encompassing many generations of experience and wisdom, is so often superior to having to learn from one's own myopic, incomplete experience in the real world. This is, in some sense, the whole point of having and telling stories.