ABSTRACT
Childhood is and always has been, an unstable concept variously interpreted and represented according to historical, social, cultural, political, and economic contexts. Such visual representations of children established a standard for what children were expected to look like and contributed to certain idealized conceptions of childhood, most notably the idea of childhood innocence. But childhood innocence has proved to be as fluid as the notion of childhood itself. Images of children today across all types of visual media demonstrate an ideological shift as they often present children as knowing, adultified, and sometimes menacing. This chapter explains how representations of children and childhood are historically and culturally situated, reflecting both local and global notions of what childhood is through various visual landscapes.
