For all the trite, alarmist laments that three times as many children want to be influencers as astronauts, the fact is that countless Australian children are already engaged in the work of influencing — yet they remain unprotected by our outdated child labour laws. Regardless of its overall merits, the government’s social media ban presents a vital opportunity to introduce legal protections for the children who have become their families’ breadwinners.

The field of contemporary Australian early  education, now dominated by privatised child care is one of surveillance and policing, compliance, extreme regulation, deliberate construction of neoliberal subjectivities — children as a type of property — and reductive understandings of what play, and children, are for.

Contemporary discussions about the lives and care and education of children in Australia are so cooked, so impoverished and hedged about with assumptions of control and paranoia, that writing an essay like this about childhood, about what it means to be a child in modern Australia, feels like I’m presenting evidence of alien life.