ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates how the child's perspective emerges and is described in Scandinavian children's books, and sheds an historical light on what adults say about how children experience the world. It presents a picture of how adults' attitudes to the child as subject are connected with the changing view of the child's rights and duties. Via Astrid Lindgren, the link between children and play later acquires great importance for the development of the child's subjectivity in the second half of the twentieth century. The chapter shows that a special attentiveness to what was thought to be the child's way of living and experiencing emerged in a number of Scandinavian writers in the first half of the nineteenth century. Scandinavian authors of children's books have long taken on the responsibility of molding how children see the world. A link between childhood and play can be identified as a constant element in the Scandinavian children's books that were published.
