In the days and weeks following the March 2020 World Health Organization declaration of the global COVID-19 pandemic, a number of national leaders in the Global North, all of them working under unprecedented and extraordinarily challenging circumstances, took time to directly address the children of their respective countries. Besides answering questions about the crisis put to them by their youngest citizens, a recurrent theme on these occasions was the imperative role of children in helping to arrest the spread of the pathogen. Recalling how children have been similarly engaged in other moments of emergency, the overtures made in the context of COVID-19 are instructive both as to the recognition of children as bona fide, effectual, and necessary social agents as well as to the limits of acceptance of their subjecthood, revealed as they are in circumstances of exception.

在2020年3月世界卫生组织宣布全球COVID-19大流行之后的几天和几周内，全球北部的许多国家领导人在前所未有的极具挑战性的环境中工作，他们花了一些时间直接与儿童面对面接触。他们各自的国家。除了回答最年幼的公民对危机的疑问外，这些场合的一个经常性主题是儿童在帮助阻止病原体传播方面的重要作用。回顾儿童如何在紧急情况下同样地参与，在COVID-19的背景下提出的建议对于将儿童视为善意，有效和必要的社会行为者以及接受的极限都具有指导意义他们的主观