This is the book in which Betsy, Tacy, and Tib all turn ten, with two numbers in their age, and therefore, according to them, have officially grown up. Their birthdays don’t actually count, they inform anyone who will listen, until all three of them turn ten. So Tacy and Tib wait until Betsy celebrates her birthday in April, and then they all officially declare themselves grownups.
They try using fancy words like “indeed” and “prefer” (which Tib doesn’t know the meaning of), begin referring to one another by their longer given names Elizabeth, Thelma, and Anastacia (which sends them into peals of laughter), and practice drinking tea with a raised pinky flourish. (They discard these affectations just as quickly.) They venture further across the Big Hill than they ever have before, coming upon the community of Little Syria, which they have only ever seen while out buggy riding with their parents. They even fall in love, simultaneously, with the sixteen-year-old King of Spain.
In the modern digital age, ten remains a milestone birthday, often marking a bit of a break with childish games and toys. Now considered the beginning of the “tween” years, children often receive their own smartphones at this age, or they will in a year or two, and may even be introduced to social media. The age of onset of puberty for girls has dropped steadily over the years, from 16.6 in 1860 to 14.6 in 1920, and now hovers around ten. The world is not only different for ten-year olds, they are different, too. And yet, in so many ways, they are much the same as their early-twentieth-century counterparts.
Betsy’s sensitivity to the process and meaning of growing older is one of her defining qualities throughout the series, and is a hallmark of these tween years, even today. She actively explores the meaning of life, growth, and maturity in ways that both Tacy and Tib are still more inclined to take for granted. As she “lay very still in the bed she shared with Julia and thought about growing up” on the eve of her birthday, she wonders whether maybe “it’s not so nice growing up. Maybe it’s more fun being a child” (p. 12, Harper Trophy paperback edition, 1993). This will become an ongoing internal debate for Betsy, as it is for so many, now as then.
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Sources:
The Digital Betsy-Tacy 