I totally agree. I see so many of these articles judging the past according to modern values. It’s absolute anachronistic nonsense if you ask me. I have no idea why people keep writing articles like this, except perhaps as some kind of signaling.
One is that Basile's use of language is just visibly more complex than Perrault--Mother Goose--who presented similar stories in simpler forms only decades later: e.g. Cinderella ("The Cinderella Cat"), The Fairies ("The Two Little Pizzas"), Puss in Boots ("Cagliuso"), and Sleeping Beauty ("Sun, Moon, and Talia"). In other words, if you compare the two, you find that some fairy tales really were written for children back then too, just not by Basile.
The other reason is maybe to warn that Basile's unexpurgated stories, e.g. in Nancy Canepa's translation, may be a surprise to 21st C. adults who've only read Perrault, Grimm, Andersen, etc., because they are not only dark or whatever--they are Rabelaisian, scatological, etc., offering some fun 17th C. cultural surprises even for adults. I don't know enough about 17th. C. Naples to have an opinion on whether Basile would have been OK with using the same language around young children--like, maybe or maybe not. I'd just note Perrault didn't, d'Aulnoy didn't, L'Héritier didn't, and so on only like 60 years later.
Well, modern is relative but quick reading of wikipedia points out that people have been writing stories specifically for children since late 17th century, and definitely solidified as a category in the early 19th centuryt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_literature#Early-...
Picking a slightly more scholarly source we find this statement
> Already during the 1690s, Fénelon, the important theologian and Archbishop of Cambrai who had been in charge of the Dauphin’s education, had written several didactic fairy tales as an experiment to make the Dauphin’s lessons more enjoyable. However, they were not considered proper and useful enough for the grooming of children from the upper classes to be published. They were first printed after Fénelon’s death in 1730. From that point on it became more acceptable to write and publish fairy tales for children, just as long as they indoctrinated children according to gender-specific roles and class codes in the civilizing process. The most notable example here, aside from Fénelon’s tales, is the voluminous work of Madame Leprince de Beaumont, who published Magasin des Enfants (1756), which included “Beauty and the Beast,” “Prince Chéri,” and other overtly moralistic tales for children.
(When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition 2nd ed., p16-17)
My grandmother told a story of a hanging she went to when she was 4 years old. That's here in the U.S. in the early 1920's. She says the whole town was there, children and all. That's totally possible seeing how today the town has a population of 6,200 - back then it was probably 2,000 or less. It's ironic that the gross coddling of children began with the Baby Boomer generation - the generation my grandmother helped raise. I guess between seeing public hangings and enduring both the Great Depression and WWII they wanted to make life easier for their kids.
In preliterate times, in which many of these stories originate, these stories were passed orally, likely around a fire or during/after a meal, where the elders told these stories to the youngers. There was likely not much segregation by age, which meant that children would be among the audience, and very likely, may have even been the target of the storyteller (if you ever watch grandparents with grandkids, even when the parents are in the room, much of the conversation may be addressed to the grandkids).
In addition, "childhood" as we have now is relatively recent. Likely as soon as they could walk, children were being involved in the adult activities of farming/gathering/hunting/fighting etc. Girls were often married shortly after puberty (so early teens). Young men were often inducted into the tribe of men early and trained as warriors (see Sparta for an extreme example, or the Jewish Bar Mitzvah where a boy is seen as an adult member of the community at age 13).
In addition, I don't think there was the concept of shielding children from the unpleasantness of life. Death was all around them. Many of them had lost mothers in childbirth. Many if not most had at least lost 1 sibling in infancy. Thus the violence and horror in the old fairy tales which we consider "adult" today, was likely not all that different from everyday life and thus not considered unsuitable for children.
As an example, think of the Roman practice of crucifixion. You could be a kid headed to market, and come upon a bunch of naked men, who were screaming in agony as they were being nailed to crosses by soldiers. Even in the modern age, hangings at Old Bailey in London were public affairs.
Thus, just because a story contains themese and/or scenes that we would consider not suitable for children today, does not mean that children were not an important part of the audience when the story was actually a folk tale being told in communities.