The Angst of Childhood
alden_pyle
Sep 20, 2025 1:45 PM
When I was a child, I read so much Calvin and Hobbes that I could recite some of the strips by heart. At the time, I connected with Calvin more than any other character in any other children's book or show or movie I was exposed to. Watterson captured the angst of childhood---not teen angst, which has been done to death in various mediums---but an angst particular to a prepubescent child that we acknowledge much less. Watterson portrays childhood angst (specifically, male childhood angst) as an almost existential dread that results from the repression of creativity and curiosity, as well as the many problems with the adult world that can be seen by a child's clear eyes. And, of course, the child's powerlessness to do anything about it.
As a child, I had never seen anything else that articulated this feeling more clearly. It felt like every other children's book was almost complicit in this repression by not directly grappling with it. Calvin and Hobbes got right to the heart of the matter---why do I hate school so much? Why can't I get along with other kids? And yet, why is any unstructured time I get wholly to myself such a paradise?
Reading it now that I'm in college, I'm struck by how little my reaction to the strip has changed. People always talk about revisiting media they loved as a child and either finding it bland and shallow or realizing how much of it they didn't understand as a kid. But neither has happened to me. I've found that second grade me understood the strip about as well as I do (exempting dated references, maybe). But more amazing is the fact that I still enjoy it just as much as I did back then. It's as if the strip taps into something that has stayed constant within me through all that time, some "inner child" (although I find the phrase obnoxious) or, maybe more accurately, some inner that belongs neither to childhood nor adulthood. It's a trick few books can pull off.
