Recently, I was wondering why the stranger people of faerie tale will demand future children as currency in exchange for performing non-trivial tasks for people. Take Rumpelstiltskin as a case study. A girl's father tells a king his daughter can turn straw into gold. The king, a skeptic with a mean homicidal streak, decides to test the claim by locking the girl up in a room full of straw, and if she can succeed in turning it into gold, he gets to marry her, if not, she dies. Presumably, option A is a reward for her as well, at least, I hope it is. But I doubt it. Anyway, a strange person, or possibly imp (I'm not really clear on whether Rumpelstiltskin is human or not) shows up and offers to turn all the straw into gold in exchange for her firstborn child. This seems a nonsensical bargain. Seriously, even if the existence of a future firstborn was assured (which even ignoring fun medieval facts about maternal and infant death rates is not) what exactly does an imp or wizard type need with a newborn human? If he just wants a child, there are in any age plenty of abandoned children he could just go get from an orphanage, there's no need to do unnecessary work and wait on an uncertain event. If he wants to eat a child (there's faery tale precedent for eating children, e.g. Hansel and Gretel), again it would be much easier to just go get an existing child rather than waiting on a meal that may never be produced, and when it is, has to be waited on for at least a few years. Think about cannibalism for a minute; even if Rumps is into veal, one doesn't eat newborns. No muscle, really. So he'd have to wait a while and feed the child until probably somewhere in the 10-12 year range* when he could perfectly well just get a 10 year old from an orphanage. Though possibly he wanted to strictly control the child's diet (which would affect the resultant meat) but even for a gourmand, this seems like a lot of work to go to for a meal when there are easier alternatives.
It is possible Rumpelstiltskin is just trying to cause pain and suffering to everyone concerned. I'm not clear on why he would want to do this, but maybe the girl wronged him at some point in the past, who knows. This whole magic-for-future-child deal just seems like not the most efficient way to go about causing the maximum amount of harm. If he does nothing while the girl is failing to spin straw into gold, she gets executed with no effort on his part. Then, if Rumps just wants some extra harm and chaos, he can start fomenting rebellion by telling people (truthfully) that their king is a vicious tyrant who murders pretty girls for failing to spin straw into gold, and really, who wouldn't fail at that? He could presumably get lots of help with an insurrection from the girl's grieving father, who is probably feeling immense guilt and probably angsty flashbacks that his boast caused the death of his daughter, and if I have learned nothing else from anime, it is that angsty flashbacks lead to superpowers. This being a peasant rebellion against a feudal king, it is unlikely to succeed, but highly likely to result in more death and starvation than usual, so chaos and harm accomplished.
This is all fun, but doesn't explain Rumpelstiltskin's actions. So I did what any thinking American with an internet would do, that is, I asked the question of my Facebook friends. After about 30 comments, an old friend of mine proposed that really, the point of this is to get some child to use in a weird rite. Faery tale characters are often sent on bizarre scavenger hunts anyway, sometimes for things to use as ingredients, as in "The Wild Swans" when Elsa has to sew shirts out of nettles from a graveyard, or sometimes just because, as when Psyche has to get some of Persephone's beauty in a box.
So there we have it.
*I asked an animal science professor about the ideal age for human consumption, and that was his expert opinion.
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