Message to every American currently between the ages of 55 and 110: I know your secret.

You had an incredibly weird childhood.

Here you are, living in 2014, pretending like your lives are normal, when as it turns out, your formative years were anything but normal. They were bizarre. And so were you. That’s the only way to put it.

I know this because I just spent all day looking at disturbing ads from the 1900s, 10s, 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s, all featuring children, and forgive me if I need a few days before I want to be around you again.

Denials will be useless, as I’ve carefully compiled ample evidence below. Let’s take a tour, category by category:

Girls Who Are a Weird Level of Hungry

This little girl needs to just settle down. That manic expression and those eager little hands are completely over-the-top. It’s just some white bread with jelly.

Okay yes, those slabs of low-grade ice cream look pretty delicious. But they don’t warrant total captivation. Let go of the bars and get ahold of yourself.

I get it, it’s a big plate of meat and you’re hungry, but again, just rein it in a notch. You’re not a dog.

Speaking of which, this girl is behaving like an uncivilized animal. You can want the Cocoanut and still act dignified.

Kids With Old Faces



That’s way too many eye wrinkles for a 6-year-old.

Okay both people in this ad need to get a fucking grip. I would reprimand the kid, but we can all see where he learned to act like a psycho. In any case, he should probably spend less time lusting over a glass of V-8 and more time worrying about the fact that both his face and hairstyle look like a 75-year-old Republican.

Aren’t you a little young to get someone’s attention with an 85-year-old person word like “say”? And why are you drinking so much soda—you’re like 7 months old.

Oh well this is a great life path. So apparently the kid in the previous ad decided to make a career out of his little act and actually got a job with Hires’ Rootbeer. All the soda has taken its toll, as he now looks 50.

We might as well explore this phenomenon, now that we’re here—

More Infants Drinking Soda

The Soda Pop Board of America was just like, “So let’s write down the things we want to be true and then make that the ad.”

Pure pleasure! Yes, you’ve really achieved something here by giving a fizzy, sugary drink to someone who has been alive for 50 days and getting a positive reaction.

That’s it. Shove it down the newborn’s throat.

Segues nicely into:

Parenting At Its Finest

Modern parents give their 2-month-old a pacifier. Maybe a blanky. In 1905? They handed the baby a razor and told it to start shaving.

Sun deprivation is the least of this baby’s problems, considering that he’s locked in the bathroom. This is literally a product for parents who are incubating their child in the gross, dark corner of the bathroom, never letting them see or know about the outside world.

On the sad little girl’s chest, it says, “Papa says it won’t hurt us!” So papa’s reasoning is, “I got a gun that has a child lock on it—now my 2-year-old daughter can finally sleep with a gun.”

“You see so many good things in Du Pont Cellophane.” Like, apparently, babies being murdered via suffocation.

No comment.

Babies With Intelligent Observations About Their Mother’s Cigarette Addiction

Really, lady? Your smoking habit has escalated to the point that your non-sentient infant can’t help but comment on it, and you respond as if you’re just talking to an adult, articulating the merits of this particular brand of cigarette?

Well now what the hell is going on here? Does this kid work for Marlboro? Where did he learn to pull manipulative shit like this?

Let’s just list the facts here:

1) This mother has a smoking addiction

2) She also beats her baby sometimes

3) The baby knows both #1 and #2, and has actually learned to outsmart this horrible woman by knowing her patterns well enough to use her addiction to mitigate the abuse.

Let’s move on.

Impossibly Annoying-Looking Redheaded Boys Excited To Put Food In Their Shit-Eating Mouths

I can barely look at this picture it annoys me so much.

A somewhat self-aware kid might not appreciate such an obvious and derogatory nickname. But Ginger here is so ragingly giddy to drink this soda that no other thought can enter his brain.

This kid looks rowdy as fuck. Good thing he took a break from egging the neighbors’ houses to climax over a glass of orange juice.

Yeah I bet you do “wish you had a million Oreos.” You know why? Cause you’re a creepy 50s ad kid who is outrageously into food. Let’s also note that this isn’t a photo, it’s a drawing—and they still chose to make him a redhead. I’ll never understand the 1950s fetish with prepubescent redheaded boys.

Murderous Nightmare-Inducing Children

This is some kind of judgment by Pears’ Soap. They had an ad team and a budget. They had time. And at the end of it all, they decided to go with a drowning baby trying to claw itself from the jaws of death.

Oh you know, just a murderous little girl covered in blood-colored dye. Zero remorse in her sociopathic facial expression.

Okay here we get to the kid that is going to haunt my sleep for the next few weeks. This is not a human child. All I can picture is being his parent and walking into his room at night to check on him, and when I’m standing over him, suddenly his eyes open wide in that smile, and his head starts spinning around and I’m in the shit trying to escape.

Here he is again. When he’s not knifing his parents to death, he keeps busy with his ad modeling career.

He’s not even trying to be non-sinister here. Somehow, the ad team at Karo cooking products looked at this ad and decided it was ready to go to the presses.

Incredibly Racist Children

“Why doesn’t your mamma wash you with fairy soap?” What a braggy little bitch. Also worth noting is the first class ire going on on the black girl’s face.

This girl just fully goes for it. Full-force bigotry. Two other questions—why is the boy wearing a dress, and why is the girl wearing shoes in the ocean?

Another gem from Pears’ Soap. Their claim is that black people are actually just really dirty white people. See? This nice white girl gives him the first bath of his life, and—voila! He’s white! The dude looks as shocked about it as I am.

And of course, if washing doesn’t work, well, you can always use paint!

Some kind of time you grew up in, 55-110 year olds.

Roly-Poly Rosey-Cheeked Rapey-Looking Four-Year-Old Boys Smugly Eating Something Sloppily

I really don’t know what else to say about this prominent genre of ad in the 40s. Let’s just meet at the bottom.

I think I’ve made my point.

55-110 year olds—any explanation for yourself?