Society has crafted rather contradictory roles for children – to be themselves but also to be projections of what adults want them to be. I can conveniently divide this subject into two parts: the happy, carefree projects of nature – like children at play – and the darker roles which the agendas of adults cast them in.

Communal photo of children on the occasion of their First Holy Communion, taken in the 1930s.

Children from the Marsa capuchin parish pose for a First Holy Communion commemorative photo by Giuseppe Cassar in 1921.

Children from the Fra Diegu orphanage in Ħamrun in 1909.

I will focus on today on this second aspect – children turned into enablers of the schemes of grown-ups. Thankfully, gone are the days when 10-year-olds were publicly made to wear monks’ or nuns’ frocks as payback for their parents’ religious vows, still current up to World War II. The pendulum has now swung to the other extreme, which sees no problem with girls’ clothes and make-up being highly sexualised.

Boys from a church orphanage receiving their First Holy Communion in the 1920s. Note their shaved heads as a precaution against lice.

Sad examples of the programming of young minds for political propaganda would be the regimentation of youths into faithful, read unquestioning, adepts of the empire – gymnasts risking breaking bones to form a Union Jack or celebrating royal occasions by gifting every child not one but two British flags to join the collective hysteria of manic loyalty to colonial servitude. 

Maltese schoolgirls celebrating the coronation of King George VI in 1937.

Closer to the home front, the Brigata Laburista, a classical example of a ‘catch ’em young’ political perversion, the brainwashing of uncritical minds with hero worship and personality cults of faux political giants, the rage of the 1950s and later, now thankfully defunct.

The Brigata Laburista demonstrating in favour of Dom Mintoff in 1959.

Young children corralled for religious testimony before the age of consent would, for the cynical, attract the same censure.

A boy tending a herd of goats in the 1910s.

I have included sparse examples of child labour, desperate survival strategies of deprived families failing to make ends meet before the law imposed a blanket prohibition of this shame.

All images from the author's collections