I always read Card's books as showing the hero's moral development to be the struggle to deal with the abuse. He or she takes the abuse and turns it into a sacrifice, in the Christian sense, but that doesn't mean it was *necessary*.

I'm reading Hamlet's Father right now (wow, the prose is *not* very good) and Hamlet Sr. tells Hamlet that he had to be harsh and neglectful to make Hamlet a strong king -- very like the way Patience is treated in Wyrms. But my reading of both stories is that the abusive fathers are *wrong*: they're rationalizing, and we the readers are supposed to see through that.

But then, I also read Ender's Game completely differently: especially when combined with Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide, I see Ender as not having saved the world *at all*, but at having been manipulated and abused by the adults he should have trusted into performing a horrible, evil act. He didn't save the world, he was abused because the adults didn't want to do the difficult work of peacemaking. The buggers (a name I do not think is coincidental) were not Ender's true enemy, the adults who were supposed to be taking care of him *were*.