Bruno Bettleheim argued that fairy tales played an important role in children’s development. How far would you agree with Bettleheim, and are his theories as relevant to fairy tales on film?

In his book The Uses of Enchantment, Bettleheim argued that children should be exposed to the harsh realities revealed in fairy tales rather than kept away from them. Bettleheim argued that children have many fears and understand that life isn't perfect. They know bad events can occur. Fairy tales, by displacing fear and anxiety into the realm of fantasy, can help children to deal with the real fears they experience in their young lives.
I agree with Bettleheim up to a point. I wouldn't expose children to a steady diet of, say, the fairy tales recorded by the Grimm brothers, but I also wouldn't surround children with a steady diet of saccharine stories that all have happy endings, as that would not be a realistic exposure to life. It's also important, I believe, to remember that life for most children now is not as harsh as it was when the fairy tales were being told, and so children today could be exposed to an unnecessary degree of anxiety if they read too many fairy tales. For example, far fewer children lose their parents to early death than in the old days. Hunger and abandonment are also both far less likely than they used to be in, say, the eighteenth century. Children may need to deal with these fears, but they don't need to be immersed in this kind of literature.
Many have criticized filmed versions of fairy tales, especially those produced by Disney, for softening  and putting happy endings on stories, such as "The Little Mermaid," that were harsher in the original version. That practice makes filmed fairy tales less relevant to Bettleheim's theories.