Exceptional childhood and COVID-19: Engaging children in a time of civil emergency

In the days and weeks following the March 2020 World Health Organization declaration of the global COVID-19 pandemic, a number of national leaders in the Global North, all of them working under unprecedented and extraordinarily challenging circumstances, took time to directly address the children of their respective countries. Besides answering questions about the crisis put to them by their youngest citizens, a recurrent theme on these occasions was the imperative role of children in helping to arrest the spread of the pathogen. Recalling how children have been similarly engaged in other moments of emergency, the overtures made in the context of COVID-19 are instructive both as to the recognition of children as bona fide, effectual, and necessary social agents as well as to the limits of acceptance of their subjecthood, revealed as they are in circumstances of exception.