A good way to explore Bruno Bettelheim's argument is to simply consider the title of his work: The Struggle for Meaning. Bettelheim's primary goal here is to find some medium that will help children to understand themselves and gain some meaning in their early life. Fairytales become the favored method of transmitting meaning to children's lives because Bettelheim ranks one's cultural heritage (when transmitted in the right way) as second important to helping children find such meaning. And while he writes that his main task is to "restore meaning" to "severely disturbed children," I don't sense that he is at all not considering other "ordinary" children. This is mainly because his motivation for restoring meaning is so that children will not need special help, in a sense, making them normal. In this light children are not casts into separate categories and collectively, children can find meaning. Literature emerges as cultural heritage and specifically fairytales are the best type of literture for children to read. This is because fairytales tell life as it is and does not make children believe that life will go on without any trouble. While children are often victors in fairytales, there is still some obstacle they must overcome for this to be so. So for Bettelheim, fairytales are important for children to read because they present true human predicaments.

Robert Darnton, however, focuses on the fairytale as a story. He considers different versions of the same tales and explores the similarites and differences in order to find out how these interpretations reflected peasant culture during the enlightenment. Darnton notes that no one tale can have one set meaning because no one story are alike. As far as comparing Darnton's writing to Bettelheim's, I feel as though because the nature of the texts are so different, this idea would not prove beneficial. Darnton is not concerned with the importace of fairytales or children's grasp of meaning, he is more concerned with the historical and cultural value of such stories.

Personally, I better enjoyed Bettelheim's writing because I agree that children need to learn the realities of life: that most things in life don't come easy. It also though makes me wonder if and how these early fairytale traditions have influenced modern children literature. Nowadays many children's books are good tools to help children gather some meaning of themselves and others. In fact, most employ some effort on the child's part in order to achieve some goal. That's something worth thinking about.