SOURCE: Smith, Janet Adam. “Unchildish Activities.” New York Review of Books 37, no. 7 (26 April 1990): 45.

In the following review, Smith offers a positive assessment of Don't Tell the Grown-Ups, calling the work a “witty and enlightening survey.”

“Somebody's been putting ideas into your head”—there, down the ages, is the voice of authority, in the form of parent, nanny, teacher, when faced with questions that threaten received ideas and their privilege of “Allow me to know best.” That they have been busily putting ideas into children's heads—ideas of behavior, morality, and the status quo—is quite another story. E. Nesbit hit off the type in her invention (in “The Cockatoucan”) of the nurse-maid transformed into the Automatic Nagging Machine, which ejects little rolls of paper carrying messages like “Don't be tiresome.”

Now comes a nice reversal. Here is Teacher herself [in Don't Tell the Grown-Ups] encouraging subversion in the...