Maybe the real issue is that they need to demand more-just not from their very tired and lonely parents. Maybe the problem isn’t that our kids are too demanding. Even our blood.īut perhaps, as a new book suggests, we’re seeing this all wrong. They need too much and take everything: our well-being, our hopes, our dreams. These are the children who pervade contemporary parenthood literature. In the mother’s arms is not a unique and vulnerable human being with a name but an alien creature who poses harm.
But as a reader and an observer I can’t help but notice that there it is again, the child as a threat, a seemingly immutable reality in our culture’s portrayal of little humans. The book is a sensitive and smart examination of postpartum depression, the kind of suffering that I have only empathized with when experienced by friends, and certainly worthy of literary treatment. “The baby I hold in my arms is a leech, let’s call her Button,” Szilvia Molnar writes in her new novel, T he Nursery. In these stories and the many others like them, maternal ambivalence, ordinary and healthy for a mother to express, is transmuted into a horror story in which children have violent, occasionally vampiric, appetites.Įven in subtler representations of the struggles of motherhood, something is amiss with our young ones. And on the 2022 HBO show The Baby, an adorable infant falls from the sky and then lots of people die.
Baby Teeth features a little girl who “may have a truly sinister agenda,” as the novel’s jacket copy explains. In the forthcoming novel Cutting Teeth, a group of bloodthirsty 4-year-olds are suspects in a murder case. M ore and more, children, long associated with innocence and joy, seem to terrify us.
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