Abstract:
Building on Roni Natov's concept of a ‘poetics of childhood’ and on recent debates about the
image of the child in literature, this paper looks at how David G. Maillu promotes relational
models of interaction between adults and children, thus challenging the patriarchal concept of
authority that has always conditioned people's understanding of childhood and is responsible for
the unproductive tendency to retrospectively idealize childhood as an idyllic phase in life, the
abuses of power which too frequently characterize the adult–child relationship. The authors
dispel the myth of childhood as an age of innocence and argue that children should be seen as
human agents for social change.
