However, it was also obvious as a kid—and I am curious if this is a common experience—that I couldn’t regulate my emotions when watching movies. Scary movies would give me insomnia; i would literally burst out crying when watching something even emotional on screen that I couldn’t understand.
Meanwhile, with books, things are either understandable or not. You learn quickly that humans are weird, cruel, loving, etc—but there’s always that wall of explicit fiction, where you can pause mid-sentence just by looking elsewhere, and it leaves you in control of the experience.
Movies force you to process the information at the rate of the film, and that is honestly far too quick for children to understand everything adults easily see, and images don’t pass like words do. Hell, I still remember the scary scenes from snow white; but only one book has ever scared me—the raw shark texts.
I imagine I also excercised some self control when I saw some stuff I didn’t want to read—I remember putting down the bourne series at age eleven after a depicition of sexual assault, but mostly because other things interested me more. (Probably the ender series—very little sex, lots of games and prognosticating!)
Tl;dr give your kids pretty much anything to read, but movies are more intense and you should watch them with your child to pause and explain or just shut off.
P.S. fairy tales were aimed at adults. Children were considered small adults. It was a recent fabrication that somehow these stories are intended primarily to entertain children. I believe this happened primarily after he Grimm brothers did their work, though.