Bettelheim argues that meaning and meaning-making—that is, making sense of one’s experiences—is fundamental to human happiness and the ability to cope with adversity. Parents cannot impose their own sense of meaning on a child; rather, the child must find it itself and at their own pace. Bettelheim believes self-understanding is the most essential step towards meaning: By understanding oneself, one can progress to understanding others and forming relationships with them.

Writing as a psychoanalytic therapist to troubled children in the 1970s, Bettelheim believes that his duty is to restore a sense of meaning to their lives. He finds that many modern children’s books do not help him in this endeavor, as they do not prepare children sufficiently for problems in the real world. These books share the dominant cultural view that young children should be offered a sanitized version of the world, where harsh realities—such as death, aging, and the worst aspects of human behavior—are removed. The problem with this is that “children know that they are not always good; and often, even when they are, they would prefer not to be” (7). Thus, the censored characters in modern children’s literature contradict what children know to be true about themselves, and this makes the child “a monster in his own eyes” (7).