I was a relatively well-behaved little kid who didn’t like getting into trouble, but I still loved reading this book (and its sequels), in which Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle helps distraught mothers cure their children of bullying, whispering, never picking up, and other “problems”. The books are a bit dated in some respects (most noticeably to me in the cookie-cutter family structures, with the moms all staying home fixing after-school snacks and the dads all earning the money) but otherwise I still find they have a lot of appeal.

Each book in the series is divided into chapters: one cure per chapter. Some of the cures are quasi-magical, like the candy that makes the whisperers lose their voices. But even the more mundane cures are quirky and over-the-top and lots of fun to read about. For instance, the kid who won’t take a bath is allowed to get so dirty that radish seeds sprinkled on his skin sprout and start to grow. Or the Slow-Eater-Tiny-Bite-Taker Cure (one of my favorites) which involved the use of successively smaller and smaller sets of dinnerware.

One of the things I remember best about these books was that quite often (though not exclusively) the stories were told from the point-of-view of the mothers. This was interesting to me, as a kid — seeing the parent as a person having to deal with problems and find solutions.