The psychologist Bruno Bettelheim said that "enchantment had its uses" for the developing child. The fairy tale was a symbolic world in which the child's struggle to understand what adulthood might mean – all those difficulties around power, passion and purpose that we have to eventually master – could be rehearsed in a reasonably safe internal space. I think we should seek to build virtual places with the same capacious and developmental purposes for our children. It's a grown-up job to consider all the subtleties of how these places might balance constraint and freedom, support and autonomy.

And we are adults, remember? There's one modern fairy story – involving angels and demons, maleficence and innocence, the prey and the predator – that we clearly shouldn't fall for. Cyberspace isn't the big bad wood. Cyberspace is what we consciously and wisely make it to be.

Source: here