Can’t trace time: The temporal politics of childhood

Time after time: The temporal foundation of childhood and childhood studies

You say, ‘go slow’/I fall behind/And the second hand unwinds.

Childhood studies inherited its temporal foundation through historical and social processes used to demarcate the child from the adult. Through this separation, the essence of childhood became its sequential location prior to adulthood in a linear pathway that required children to grow “up.” This inheritance, as Tesar et al. (2016) explain, presents the field with an aporia: we must speak to the problem of time while inside its naturalized grip; we must offer critique of the thing that organizes our writing, our thinking, and the subject of our research. Continued examination of this internal contradiction, however, also opens fresh potential for political engagement by challenging the boundaries that separate adult(hood) and child(hood).

Linear time not only structures subjecthood – determining who is included in the categories of “child” and “adult” – it also structures global “development” as a universal arc through which difference is mapped as temporal abnormality: delayed, incomplete, or in crisis (Chakrabarty, 2000; Ibrahim and Ahad, 2022). The language of developed/developing justifies global hierarchies of oppression, and global inequalities become masked by a linear temporality naturalized through the “developing” child (Burman, 2008). This equation means that if a child becomes visible because they are progressing “well” (Walton, 2021), then a child who is “out of sync” is problematic (Knight, 2019: 76). Such constructed differences interrupt the “temporality of anticipation” (Thomas and Baraitser, 2018: 68) that childhood proffers and point to the separation of adult and child that is sculpted from “a waiting period oriented to a chrononormative future” (Walton, 2021: 335), both locally and on a global scale.

The essence of western childhood is defined by its measurement against adult minds, bodies, emotions, experiences, and worth. These critiques are often referenced in childhood studies to demonstrate how childhood is produced through historical, social, and cultural specificities (James and Prout, 1997). Yet these same critiques also participate in the calculated exactitude that dictates who counts as a child and how that counting takes place. Of course, not all childhoods around the world are defined by universalized understandings of linear time. The prominence of this temporal model in childhood studies reflects the continued dominance of European and North American thought, as well as the active exportation of western constructions of childhood. Globalized childhood discourses tend to universalize children’s lives by composing the “ideal child” through western normative frameworks, a reflection of epistemic hierarchies that marginalize the majority of the world’s children by casting them as “catching up” to a subject position marked by liberal rights and freedoms (Balagopalan, 2024: 148). As Abebe et al. (2022) ask: “why [do] most of the world’s children have their experiences and contexts interpreted through the theoretical canons, vernaculars, and institutions of northern academia” (p. 257)? In what follows, we sketch how the temporality of western childhood came to appear natural, and how it has shaped the temporal landscape that both childhood studies and children around the world must now navigate. Despite its cultural specificity, this shaping remains deeply influential, sustained in large part by the exportation of Eurocentric thought under the guise of universality.

Childhood studies scholars generally point to the Enlightenment and Romantic eras as the historical period when differing age groups became separated in a way that defined modern western childhood (Bernstein, 2011; James et al., 1998). Through political texts, the advent of colonialism, and the development of industrial capitalism, shifts in how humanity was understood shaped constructions of childhood as an idealized space of vulnerability and development (Knight, this issue). The emergence of this definition coincided with constructions of linear time that organized the world through Enlightenment ideals of progress, and through which social difference was refigured as temporal delay. Philosophers who pontificated on childhood in their writing illuminate the formation of the modern child framed by attempts to naturalize and universalize the composition of linear time.

English philosopher John Locke (1989/1693) theorized that people were not born with reason but had to be taught through the accumulation of sensory experiences. The human mind, he wrote, is a blank slate, or tabula rasa, at birth. Building on Locke’s “rationality-to-come” (Knight, this issue) and furthering the idea that childhood exists as a developing state disconnected from adulthood, Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1963/1762) argued for childhood as a time of serenity before the hardships of the adult world encroached to destroy its peace. The popularity of Rousseau’s Emile led to a perspective on childhood as not just fleeting, but fragile (Garlen, 2019). While Locke and Rousseau were political philosophers, their ideas influenced parenting norms, the growth of mass education, and a newly minted timeframe for childhood – one that was traced through a linear structure.

The temporal distinction of childhood is most visible in the concept of innocence, cemented by Romantic poets including William Wordsworth and William Blake, who mused on the holiness of elite childhoods set against pastoral aesthetics (Bernstein, 2011; Garlen, 2019). In innocence, we can see how linear temporality sculpts childhood’s essence. From Locke, Eurocentric values formed around teaching affluent children in age-appropriate ways that saturated their minds with “suitable” knowledge to attain the “right” kind of adulthood. From Rousseau, the drive to preserve children’s perfection instilled anxiety about its inevitable loss, dictating cultural, racialized, gendered, and age-based norms around what childhood “should” look like, how it is defined, and who deserves protecting. As Kerry Robinson (2008) explains, the obsession over childhood innocence, resulting in moral panics throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, reveals “an adult state of preoccupation with a longing for something lost and forever unattainable” (p. 116). Innocence exists only in the past tense, anticipated as ending or grieved as already gone.

Shaped by linear time and its authorizing power to generate hierarchies through separation, innocence reveals the inequalities of childhoods. As childhood studies scholars have long argued, innocence is steeped in colonial violence and white supremacy, weaponized in day-to-day interactions against children of colour, queer children, non-western children, poor children, and disabled children (Dyer, 2020; Garlen and Ramjewan, 2024). While infused with the “persuasive power” (Bernstein, 2011: 2) to buffer some children from harm, as in Rousseau’s “noble child,” for whom protection and nurturing are demanded, it is also strategically denied to others on the pretense that they are neither “noble” nor “child” enough. Hannah Dyer (2020) calls this hypocrisy “the asymmetries of innocence” as it is both an assumed condition of western childhood and routinely refused to those deemed lacking in “natural” virtue. Innocence acts as a temporal shield for western, white, middle-class, gender-conforming, able-bodied children as its discursive authority protects and prolongs childhood in such circumstances.

But for those who fall outside of these precise capacities, the withdrawal of innocence submits that a child is doing childhood wrong, processes that childhood studies scholars have tracked as adultification (McPherson, this issue), racialization (Bernstein, 2011), sexualization (Robinson, 2008), problematization (Karmiris, this issue; Knight, 2019), dehumanization (Dyer, 2020), and the standardization of “normal” bodies, minds, and development (Burman, 2017). As these theories suggest, lack of innocence is a crime of atemporality, a discursive-material pronouncement in which children who do not conform to the temporal essence of childhood are made undeserving of the security that innocence affords.

The crime of atemporality is also visible in the racialization of linear time and the “temporal ‘othering’” (Balagopalan, 2024: 143) that happens to Indigenous children in settler states. Indigenous children are denied innocence because they do not participate in the futurity of the state vis-à-vis “settler time,” or the normalization of a non-native, unidirectional, singular temporality (Kidman, 2015; Rifkin, 2017). Indigenous children have played a key role in western expansion and nation-building mythologies in the settler state of Canada, for instance, where they were systematically imprisoned in residential schools to guarantee a circuit breaker between “old” and “new” worlds (Tuck and Yang, 2012). The 1879 federal policy of aggressive assimilation was meant to safeguard “settler futurity,” or “a past upon which a white future is ensured” (Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013: 79). Viewing Indigenous peoples, including children, as remnants of history authorizes inhumane treatment as a natural result of civilization’s inevitable progress (Kidman, 2015). In this way, genocide is authorized, and Indigenous children are conscripted into a settler time that both denies them protections and wipes out possibilities for Indigenous futures.

In the late 19th and throughout the 20th centuries, innocence also became essential to the powerhouse discipline of developmental psychology. Locke and Rousseau’s assertions that children required special attention to develop properly parlayed into a scientific field of study designed around children’s biological and emotional distinction from adulthood (Burman, 2017). Linear time and its incremental measurement became the exacting tool of developmental psychologists forging a new science that manipulated children’s skills into universalized chronological advancement. G. Stanley Hall (1904) claimed that developing from a child to an adult recapitulated social evolution from pre-modern “savagery” to modern “civilization.” Sigmund Freud’s (2016/1905) psychosexual development charted a child’s personality growth based on biologically fixed stages, each corresponding to an erogenous zone. And Jean Piaget (1955/1923) divided childhood up into distinct stages in his theory of cognitive development, positing that children progress through each phase as they acquire knowledge and experience.

While unique in their approaches to child development, what unites these paradigms is a biologically determined model of progression rooted in stages. Like philosophers who saw childhood as empty or delicate compared to adult worldliness, so too did developmentalists plot a course for childhood along a sequential path of growth, to be traversed using clearly demarcated stages as generalized measurements of success. As a field, developmental psychology biologized the modern western story of childhood based on a temporal essence that is oriented toward the future as “becoming” adult. As a result, a sweeping version of “the child” was produced who inches along the marker system, and nonconformity to these time-sensitive, culturally shaped capacities was framed as a lack, no longer on the road to “being,” but stalled, slow, or in reverse (Burman, 2017; Knight, 2019).

Childhood studies established itself as a field in the late 1980s and early 1990s in opposition to the biological determinism and non-agentic “becoming” framework of developmental psychology (Hanson, 2017). The foundational critique of childhood studies – that children should be considered agentic beings rather than passive becomings (James et al., 1998) – was a challenge to the developmentalist imperative that children were only adults-in-training. While the being/becoming dichotomy has been vital to the growth of childhood studies, it also relies on the child as a stable, traceable subject and re-theorizations of this foundational dynamic are still grounded in assumptions of its validity. For example, Emma Uprichard (2008) theorizes children as both beings and becomings to honour their desire to grow up and become adults while also enjoying their present childhoods. And Karl Hanson (2017) adds a third temporal dimension through the triumvirate construction of “been, being, and becoming” (p. 282), which aims to challenge the linearity embedded in the original dyad through overlap across past, present, and future.

While such reworkings risk retaining the baggage outlined above, efforts to re-imagine the being/becoming dichotomy have also opened the door for challenges to the temporal essence of childhood – and, by extension, to the field of childhood studies. These interventions reflect a vital focus on how chronology affects children, where linear time conceals Eurocentric dominance and racialized violence, and where adherence to sequential time constrains how children are perceived and how they perceive themselves and the world (Millei, 2021; Ramjewan and Garlen, 2020). Always implicated in exacting measurements that ignite and authorize separation, exclusion, and dehumanization, linear time carries forward the epistemic violence of its own making. This aporia thus demands rethinking the field of childhood studies, what it stands for, and where it wants to go. The papers introduced in the following section showcase precisely this kind of (re)imagining where, as the Talking Heads (1980) sing in Once in a Lifetime: “Time isn’t holding us/Time isn’t after us.”

It’s just a jump to the left: What else can childhood studies do?

With a bit of a mind flip/You’re into the time slip/And nothing can ever be the same/You're spaced out on sensation/Like you're under sedation/Let’s do the time warp again.

The transformative capacity of non-linear temporalities in childhood studies cannot be made visible through conventional approaches to the concepts of “the child” or “childhood,” which are rooted in language that often precludes their own critique. As our contributors demonstrate, approaches to non-linear time as cripped, queered, lingering, and diffracted, and critiques of time as racialized, colonized, neoliberal, and developmentalist, enable a complexity of analysis and political multiplicity that is foreclosed by the singularity of measured time. The articles we describe in this section offer varied responses to the question: What else can childhood studies do beyond a focus on the stable, traceable child subject?

Of course, non-linear theorizing of childhood is not new. Cross-pollination between childhood studies and settler colonial studies, decolonial studies, Indigenous studies, Black studies, critical disability studies, affect studies, posthumanism, and queer and trans studies, among other critical theories, have helped shape the exciting temporal landscape in which the field now finds itself. Drawing on these multidisciplinary convergences, our contributors add fresh examples to a growing body of work that highlights childhood as a rich nodal point for theorizing time.

In her beautiful recounting of an adoption process entwined with the care of a disabled sibling, Chelsea Jones meditates on waiting. In Waiting for Care: A Reflection on (M)otherhood and Siblinghood in Crip Time(s), Jones describes the agony of waiting to hear about an adoption application while also contemplating how her family communally supports her adult brother, who has Down Syndrome. She calls this knitted dynamic, “anticipatory care and anticipatory grief.” Waiting for a child who may never materialize, Jones takes the reader on a journey through the realities of the Canadian adoption process: government red tape; racism, sexism, and heterosexism; social worker judgements; and intimate partner negotiations.

Within these complex contours, Jones embodies crip time. Felt as a disruption to normalized routines and rhythms, crip time rejects the ableism and developmentalism embedded in heteronormative linearity. Instead, Jones prioritizes “making kin” as part of a collaborative existence that resists the chrononormativity of capitalism’s demands, particularly as they define how and which bodies count as family. The article contests not only the “who” of motherhood, but also the “when,” foregrounding a temporality shaped by uncertainty, care, and deferred attachment. Jones’ waiting-as-method resists the figure of the stable, traceable child subject, revealing time’s affective force through a politics of waiting marked by love, loss, and longing.

Anticipatory grief also saturates Hannah Dyer and Casey Mecija’s exquisitely layered text, as the authors explore the affective intensities of childhoods “that stay.” In Queer Temporalities of Desire in Aftersun: Childhood Memory and Sonic Expression, Dyer and Mecija propose a compelling psychoanalytic reading of longing in Aftersun, directed by Charlotte Wells (2022). Reverberating childhoods are at work in the film and in Dyer and Mecija’s analysis as they pull threads across time and space to examine how enduring childhoods impress themselves on fragile adulthoods. A grown daughter tries to make sense of a holiday with her father when she was 11 years old by reading time backwards to collect shards of memory and reparative resources. Using a Freudian approach to wish fulfilment, the authors’ exploration of child-adult subjectivity creation is sensitive to emotion, motion, sound, and silence.

Dyer and Mecija theorize the non-linear temporal happenings in the film with queer time, which challenges heteronormative and developmental logics, allowing for recursive relationships with the past. Through flashbacks and a dreamscape punctuated by sonic intensity, the viewer is never quite sure in which direction time flows. What the authors conclude is that adulthood and childhood are neither impermeable nor distinct. Dyer and Mecija thus queer time, revealing its instability and demonstrating how memory holds space for porous childhoods and adulthoods to pour into one another in a multi-directional cascade.

While Jones and Dyer and Mecija explore affective childhoods that traverse space, time, and imagination, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and Kelly-Ann MacAlpine offer children lessons in counter-temporality. In their gripping exploration of how accelerated modernity permits environmental degradation, the authors ask young children to consider garbage beyond “putting trash in the bin.” In Lingering with Food: Attending to Waste Temporalities in Early Childhood, the authors draw on cultural studies scholar Byung-Chul Han’s theory of lingering to highlight its transformative potential. Pacini-Ketchabaw and MacAlpine ask children to think with food scraps as sites of inquiry. Through observations, the children witness how food changes over time – shrinking, decomposing, resisting containment – and in so doing, nurture relationships with waste, time, and one another. These lingering impressions enliven what would otherwise be discarded, and food scraps emerge not as inert matter but as active participants in relational temporalities. The children come to understand that they are not separate from waste, but part of a common world entangled with its responsibilities.

Pacini-Ketchabaw and MacAlpine theorize lingering not as a slowing of time, but as a spreading out of time – a way of resisting the condensed, hyper-productive temporalities that keep us inattentive and tethered to the clock. In contrast, lingering opens us to sensory and relational temporalities. The authors make a convincing case for teaching children what Han calls our “capacity for contemplation,” not only as an antidote to environmental crisis, but also to repair our relations with the world.

While Pacini-Ketchabaw and MacAlpine showcase a multispecies, relational approach, Lindsay Sheppard offers different entanglements that similarly shift how time is felt in Past-Present-Future Childhoods: Technology, Time, and Childhoods in Narratives of Pandemic Parenting. In this case, the stable, traceable child subject is displaced by the mutually dependent agencies emergent among children, parents, and technology during the lockdowns of COVID-19. Sheppard’s incisive posthuman considerations push us to ponder how the permeable boundaries of child(hood) and adult(hood) constantly interact to destabilize their hierarchical arrangement, showing them to be “material-discursive phenomena, always intertwined, iterative, multiple, and becoming with and through each other.” After Karin Murris’ (2016) “childadult” subversion, Sheppard explores how parenting during lockdowns was felt through splintered temporalities: pandemic time, screen time, before time, and endless time.

Drawing on Karen Barad’s method of diffraction to “re-turn” data previously analyzed, Sheppard “troubles time” by revealing the “spacetimematterings” of this unique temporal context. Parents’ gingerly navigated screen time through judgements of “good” and “bad” technology use; children’s loneliness and confusion; and mothers’ guilt and exhaustion. By exploring these phenomena as co-constituting rather than individuated, Sheppard refuses linear developmental frameworks. Instead, the author theorizes seven moments of wonder using temporal curvatures that show childhood and adulthood as continuously shaped by their ontological inseparability. Human exceptionalism is thus displaced, as is the trace of a stable child subject who grows and changes independently of the contexts in which they exist.

If these contributions reveal the affective, ecological, and diffractive entanglements of time, other contributions turn our attention to the structural violences through which time orders race, hierarchy, behavior, and expectation. In Histories of Childhood and Man: Implications for Childhood Studies, Hunter Knight outlines the historical development of childhood to show its simultaneous emergence with enslavement and colonization. Drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s social theory of the human, Knight investigates how the construction of childhood that ascended through liberal thought and the science of child development arose in relation to colonial and racial violence. Her examination is structured through anticolonial temporalities that refuse a linear understanding of a past that has passed and instead interrogates how the definition of childhood is bound up in historical constructions that are exclusionary, racialized, and acutely tied to colonial power.

Knight’s analysis focuses on how childhood is entangled with a genre of the human that Wynter names “Man,” a modern western invention that defines who counts as human through exclusions of race, class, ability, and geography. Through the author’s fascinating historical exploration, Man is linked to important currents in childhood studies, including rights, development, and innocence. Given their foundations in colonialism, Knight argues, these topics necessarily carry violent logics forward that limit how they can be transformed, despite efforts to tease apart past from present. This also means that Man is dependent on linear time as naturalized through childhood, suggesting that a dismantling of childhood’s temporal essence directly threatens Man’s dominance. Questioning universalized notions of childhood thus opens possibilities for transforming what it means to be human.

The urgency of challenging childhood’s temporal essence is also highlighted by Kisha McPherson. In Children in Cuffs: Black Girlhood in the Wake of Enslavement in North America, McPherson brilliantly critiques foundational theories of childhood for how they fail to acknowledge and conceptualize Black children’s lives. She argues that the temporal linearity that supports childhood studies, including protection, innocence, and being/becoming, assumes a neutrality of childhood experiences. This generalizability, McPherson explains, privileges children “whose right to their personhood remains unchallenged.” Drawing on Christina Sharpe and other Black studies' scholars, she argues that North American histories of white supremacy and enslavement continue to dominate and shape Black childhoods. This temporal insight highlights Black children’s experiences in the wake of slavery that also refuses a past that has passed. McPherson concludes that critiquing these legacies is essential to ongoing theorizations of childhood and temporality.

McPherson draws on five media accounts of Black girls who faced police violence across the US and Canada to explore how these traumatic incidents rely on adultification. Each case highlights how Black children were prohibited from accessing the protection, innocence, and developmental discourses that frame normative understandings of childhood, thus demonstrating the ongoing processes of dehumanization that continue to shape Black children’s lives long after slavery has been abolished. McPherson concludes with a provocation for the field: childhood studies must more deeply theorize how linear time enables anti-Black racism. If the topic remains under researched, McPherson argues, racist threads in both the temporal essence of childhood and in the field itself will endure.

Focusing on how linear time has defined behavioural management for children in school, Maria Karmiris similarly issues a call for temporal critique. In ABCs Unravelled: The Time and Timing in Calls for Behavioural Change, the author skillfully examines ABC charts, a behavioural management tool that asks educators to trace the antecedent, behavior, and consequence of students’ disobedience. Karmiris locates how these charts are wrapped up in and further neoliberal temporalities, in which a supposedly more efficient future depends on the perpetuation of injustice and exclusion. She argues that these charts are not really about students’ behaviour, but a neoliberal feedback loop in which children are (mis)represented as temporally “out of sync” in a manner that preserves the hyper-individualism of neoliberal logics.

Drawing on decades of experience as an educator tasked with completing ABC charts, Karmiris describes the impossibility of temporally calculating a child’s mischief within the confines of its boxes. The multidirectional temporalities of children’s lives mean that the targeted performance may have been preceded by a classroom activity, but it also may have been preceded by a memory, an imagined future, or a distraction. The educator’s ability to perceive the antecedent is similarly influenced by factors that shape their own temporal moment. Karmiris argues that the ABC chart is a tool for neoliberal temporal compliance, a reproductive process of labeling problem children through racist and ableist strategies that reiterate their exclusion from the presumed efficiency of neoliberal futures.

The nuance that Karmiris highlights in individual temporal experiences reverberates in The Fluidity of Success over Time: Understanding the Experience of Success Through the Voices of Young People by Kaitlin Fredericks, Carla Cesaroni, Shahid Alvi, and Christopher O’Connor. Fredericks and her colleagues argue that theorizing youth success is often tied to a developmental temporality that prioritizes gendered, heteronormative, and middle-class expectations, such as marriage, purchasing a home, or educational goals, and fails to account for the diversity and fluidity of youths’ lives. Challenging assumptions about success, the authors examine a study of 26 young men engaged in a community-based prevention and youth leadership program. They found that while the youth referenced dominant notions of success, their own interpretations were much more intricate. Success was ambiguous, contextual, and organized around goals that carried personal relevance.

Fredericks and colleagues mount an important argument: through the youths’ unique conceptualizations of success, they challenge a linear life course assumed by many adults as the norm. Instead, the youth always framed success as fluid and fluctuating. Rather than impediments or interruptions, they perceived anything “off-time” as part of a non-sequential route to personal visions of accomplishment. In this way, the young people in Fredericks and colleagues’ study resisted the “proper” development attached to a straight life course and instead embraced a circuitous, rhizomatic route. The article shines light on young people’s voices to theorize a new vision for how youth transitions can be imagined. Now, in our final section, we turn to new visions for how young people can be imaged vis-à-vis the multi-temporal landscape of childhood studies.

Temporal possibilities: Political modalities in childhood studies

Time, time, time/See what’s become of me/While I looked around for my possibilities.

While childhood studies scholars debate the significance of non-linear temporalities for the field, children around the world are busy living them. Non-linear temporalities have always existed alongside linear time, and multiple temporalities have always, as Spyrou (2020) writes, “manifest[ed] in real children’s lives” (p. 5). Indigenous temporalities, for example, reject a flat, consecutive structure in favor of relationality, continuity, and kinship (Simpson, 2017). While Indigenous temporalities are diverse, Mark Rifkin (2017) notes that they explore ways of “being-in-time that are not reducible to being in a singular, given time” (p. 3). Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017), a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writes about “radical resurgence” (p. 1), where rebuilding a world wiped out by colonial violence sustains both perseverance in the present and a shared vision for the future. As Simpson (2017) explains, the land, while stolen from her people, still offers her “a way of living in an Nishnaabeg present that collapses both the past and the future and as a way of positioning myself in relation to my Ancestors and my relations” (p. 2). Nishnaabeg time engages a recursive strategy of accountability that ensures care of generations yet to come, weaving together past and present with a collective future. Simpson thus describes the practice of cultural restoration as “a complete overturning of the nation-state’s political formations” (p. 10) because it does not participate in forward-moving “progress.” Instead, it engages relational and circuitous temporalities that generate hope, providing a mechanism for survival in the face of settler-colonial erasure.

Indigenous temporalities, along with other non-western ways of living time, like Buddhist and Hindu beliefs in reincarnation and karma, where time is multidirectional; and sub-Saharan African “event time,” where the “right” time to do something is felt intuitively rather than structured by the clock (Mbiti, 1990), highlight the co-existence of temporal variances. Time’s coevalness – that we live in time alongside each other but not in the same way – speaks to time’s vernacular. We exist in different timescapes that follow varying patterns, seasonal shifts, and everyday events that sustain social worlds. Capitalist logics seek to control these worlds in the name of progress by framing cultural, geographic, and physical difference as backward or delayed and by seeking to corral variations into measurable outputs (Fabian, 1983). Yet time’s vernacular is never consistent, even within western cultures where linear time is dominant. We all live time in rhizomatic ways. In children’s lives, the mixed temporalities of family time, play time, and fantasy time can feel incongruous with the capitalist and developmental requirements of forward-moving growth. Attending to how these time-worlds collide opens possibilities for childhood studies to engage time – and children – differently.

Another way that multiple temporalities manifest in real children’s lives is through lived subjectivities that do not align with the stable, traceable child subject bound by innocence and successive development. Describing the passion and effort many young people devote to the environmental movement, Spyrou (2020) laments the field’s lack of engagement with how children imagine themselves as “future-makers” (p. 7). While the figure of the child is positioned as an “emblem of futurity” (Dyer, 2020: 1), actual children are not often granted access to power that might affect the future. But young activists embody a subjectivity that resists (failed) adult leadership, upsetting the temporal limits placed on children. Such resistance – infused with a de facto critique of adult authority – means that children who take up temporally incongruent subjectivities challenge the adult–child hierarchy.

The articles in this collection offer multidisciplinary approaches to time that show the material consequences of a strict adherence to temporal essence. The temporal politics of childhood are thus as varied as time itself. Of course, the stable, traceable child subject will remain connected to childhood studies as it forms the foundation for legal- and rights-based approaches. Children experience harm and injustice that must be attended to, at least in part, through existing avenues. But other political possibilities materialize when the child is released from the binds that constrain it. For example, queer and crip temporalities reframe pauses or breaks in developmental pathways as normal and powerful (McRuer, 2018; Stockton, 2009). These mutually inclusive approaches reveal a politics of refusal that showcases what childhood can look like outside linear directives to grow “up.” Through this lens, non-normative childhoods are celebrated, rather than positioned as crimes of atemporality that must be lamented or restored. When young people refuse to conform to socially accepted temporalities, we can understand their rejection as resistance and celebrate the making of new subjectivities that continue to expand the boundaries of childhood.

A related challenge to linear time arrives via the politics of affect, where the impressions children make on the world and vice versa can be understood as interconnected rather than as individuated events. Such politics draw on sub- and pre-conscious inflections that necessitate attunement to the emotional registers and subtle entanglements that go unnoticed in children’s lives (Murris, 2016). A politics of affect invites us to consider what childhood looks like beyond a fleshy body, focusing instead on its emergence with the world. Such a perspective shifts the locus of politics outside the physical boundaries of the child and into relational intersections that include people, things, emotions, places, and environments. A politics of affect “offers ways to think, feel, and live [childhood] without defaulting to representational stasis that positions it as either this or that” (Pomerantz, 2024: 100). Childhood becomes sensation or intuition, opening transformative possibilities and deeper ways of understanding beyond the limits of a temporally defined subject.

As we have explored throughout our editorial, the temporal essence of childhood is grounded in colonialism and the racialization of linear time, opening a decolonial politics that seeks to challenge it and the legacies it carries. A decolonial politics contests linear histories where constructs of modernity, development, and progress seem to organize “the world as it is” and not how it has been built by hierarchies of racism (Balagopalan, 2024: 145). In response, a decolonial politics asks us to consider how a nonlinear approach to time in a world haunted by the ongoing ravages of colonialism can excavate the epistemic hierarchies embedded in constructions of childhood. These challenges are bolstered through southern theories that resist the universalization of linear time and provide alternate temporal possibilities for how childhood is lived and known (Abebe et al., 2022).

Lastly, but by no means exhaustively, a speculative politics invites us to imagine futures not sequentially tethered to pasts or presents, but coexisting, informing, and looping through each other. The example of future-makers offers a useful opening for temporal imaginings that need not be chronological. A speculative politics has potential to engage fantasy and fiction, where scenarios scarcely envisioned become part of children’s world-building and thus become feasible. Speculative politics invite us to imagine children as not simply moving from past to present to future but living futures alongside the present in worlds where projections for a better life support survival and hope.

Reflecting on the possibilities presented in this introduction and in the articles this special issue holds, we return to the aporia at the heart of childhood studies. In a world where children continually transgress developmentally “appropriate” thresholds of knowledge, expression, and exposure – where war, death, genocide, and environmental crisis are daily facts – is it time to re-examine what we mean by childhood itself, and its persistent positioning as prior to, and lesser than, adulthood? The problem is not what children do “right” or “wrong,” but how time structures these judgments. It is not the traceable child who fails time, but time that we imbue with traceability that fails the child.