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-Wigglebooks, 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 stories about the improbably named Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, a childless woman who serves as an unlicensed psychopharmacologist to her suburban neighborhood’s Baby Boomer kids. You see, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle possesses a treasure chest of medicines to treat children’s bad habits—and unlike Ritalin, these cures involve bad trips.
[For more on this story by DARA HORN, go to https://www.theatlantic.com/fa...d-conformity/554453/]
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