Child Heroes

"Know your audience" is the advice given to every storyteller from Homer to Spielberg, and it is no less applicable to fairy tales. For a story to work, it but be understood and well-received by those who hear it. So what audience could be pandered to with the use of children as main characters

The answer is a simple one: children. children hear these stories of other young characters going on adventures and accomplishing deed and they can see themselves in it. As such, children in fairy tales play two roles, that of the hero and that of the victim. Look at Hansel and Gretel for example. As victims they are abandoned by their cruel stepmother in the forest and let to starve, but as heroes they slay a witch and return to their father with the key to future prosperity. In Little Red Riding Hood, LRRH is a victim when she is led astray by the wolf and tricked into his lair, while as a hero she outwits and escapes him. The role of children is thus for the children listening to put themselves in the shoes of the character. Children understand and fear being abandoned by their parents or threatened by something in the dark, but they wish and dream that they can defeat these evils that seem to loom so large.

From a Freudian perspective they  serve much the same purpose, save that they are representative of the mental journeys of the children rather than the children themselves. In this perspective, Hansel and Gretel tells the story of children who must separate themselves from their parents, only to find themselves endangered as their puerile oral fixation leads them to fixate on one who reminds them of the safety of home. Thus, these children are only safe when they shuck off this fixation and return to their true family. In LRRH, the protagonist's journey represents an awakening sexuality and how her voyage away from the shelter of her parent's home is the only way she can begin this journey.

Thus, in all perspectives, the child heroes represent the children hearing the story, but whether they represent the children from the child or adult perspectives is dependent on the reader.