To my mind that sort of attitude tends towards complacency and overconfidence. We should not imagine that they want to ‘help’ us or that they ‘love’ humankind.
they are content to live separately from us- indeed, they would prefer to do so- but sometimes necessity obliges them to make contact. they are reserved and won’t reveal themselves readily. We shouldn’t presume to know their plans or to have much hope of changing them 
They have their own agenda and their own rules by which they live.
They may look like us physically, but they are unlike us and any resemblance should not put us off our guard
their resemblance to us should not be mistaken for affinity. they can’t be taken for granted and must be treated with all due respect and caution. This will be apparent from my postings on this site and from all my fictional creations, but most strongly, perhaps, in the person of Maeve in Albion awake!I’d hesitate to antagonise or patronise her: I may have imagined her as smaller of stature, but there’s no doubting her formidable determination I don’t conceive of them as small, either physically or in their activities. the fairies are a serious and scary people. I’ll use some characters from my own books to illustrate these convictions, or preconceptions (or prejudices!) of mine: My view of Faery is rather darker and I’d summarise their main personality traits as follows. Mabel Lucy Attwell, The Changeling.Enter a caption A darker view? Perhaps Graham Ovenden’s painting at the head of this post is most appropriate: there’s beauty, but there’s something beneath, in that distracted self-absorbed look. This is a gross underestimation and misconception. The genre of imagery shown below is part of our problem with fairies: because of Shakespeare and his contemporaries and successors, we have come to see them as cuddly and sweet and ideally suited to little girls. I have an affection for the flower fairy art of Cicely Mary Barker and Margaret Tarrant, and even (sometimes) the plump cuddly creations of Mabel Lucy Atwell, but my own conception of their identity and activities is very different. As those of you who read these comments will no doubt have detected, I have little time for such sugary figures. I’ve written in the past about certain modern, cute manifestations of fairy kind: Santa’s elves for example and the Tooth Fairy. I’d like to say a little more about my view of their general character and interaction with human kind, as I think it will inform an understanding of my own approach to the subject in these postings. Some months ago I posted about my personal views of the nature and conduct of fairy-kind. 
“Be careful how ye speake here o’ the Wee Folk/ Or they will play such pranks on thee and thine/ Nae doubt, they dae a lot of good whiles/ But if provoked, they can be maist unkind.” (Henry Terrell, The wee folk of Menteith, p.46)
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