The Immense Pressure on Children to Behave as Tiny Adults

This article is part of Parenting in an Uncertain Age, a series about the experience of raising children in a time of great change.

So much of raising children is unimaginable until it happens, an abstract future materialized awkwardly into an actual child covered in dirt. Amid constant unpredictability, one small unsung comfort for parents is the chance to revisit books from childhood, to share with your own children the stories you knew and loved.

Recently I came across my old copies of Betty MacDonald’s Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books, a series about magic cures for children’s foibles that amazed me as a child. But when I read them to my own children, I was stunned to discover that these silly books are actually horror stories—though for reasons no child could ever comprehend.

The books, children’s best sellers from the 1950s that my mother passed to me in the 1980s, are seemingly anodyne