Re-childing the COVID-19 pandemic; and what we lose from the un-childed public

Abstract

For several decades childhood scholars have noted children's systematic exclusion from public in many risk-averse societies, a disappearance exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. While many have noted the impoverishing effects for children from such exclusion, during my stay in a New Zealand Managed Isolation and Quarantine (MIQ) facility, I came to ask, what does society lose when we un-child the public? Through a feature comic, I draw the story of how children infiltrated MIQ's age-segregated spatial–temporal boundaries to inadvertently or deliberately deliver unique forms of care to others with whom they otherwise had no contact. If MIQ represents a microcosmic refraction of New Zealand's adult-centric structure, then children's chalk drawings demand a radical rethinking of who and what constitutes public health care and remind us what we gain when we recognize what children do for us.