its not meant for children, German fairytales aren’t either

Woah there! German fairy tales were meant for children! That’s explicitly their target audience.

The whole point was to scare the children into behaving a certain way. Like, “don’t go wandering off alone. Bad things can happen!”

If you just tell your kid that they won’t listen. However, if you tell them a story about how kids that wandered off alone into a forest got cooked and eaten by a witch then maybe they’ll stick to the village (and be wary of strangers).