History Main / ChildrenAreSpecial

* A somewhat twisted version in the ''Literature/KnightAndRogueSeries''. In general humans are the only species without magic, only having weak abilities like vague senses, but there are some children who can use magic. Children only, becuase only simple children can use magic, and between their powers and their mental impairments and whatever other health problems come with they never last to adulthood.

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-->-- '''Jesus''', [[Literature/TheFourGospels Matthew 11:25]], ''Literature/TheBible''

* ''Literature/PeterPan'': While there are some adults in Neverland, only kids are allowed to ''visit'' there, and Peter Pan kicks out any kids who "seem to be growing up". Additionally, while there are a few adults who believe in Peter, believing in him is said to be very rare among adults.

* The little girls in Zilpha Keatley Snyder's ''Literature/TheChangeling1970'' believe that "babies are born knowing all sorts of magic stuff, until they start thinking separately and forget everything." They rely on a baby sister as a kind of [[ChildMage oracle/talisman]]. Snyder's subsequent ''[[Literature/GreenSkyTrilogy Green-Sky]]'' fantasy trilogy builds on this idea, then inverts it: infants have ESP but the fact that powers are lost with maturity isn't a cute bit of Wordsworthian nostalgia but a symptom of what's literally wrecking the culture.

->''At that time Jesus exclaimed: "I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to little ones.''
-->-- '''[[Literature/TheBible Matthew 11:25]]'''

* The short story ''Mimsy Were the Borogoves'' by Lewis Padgett (a pseudonym of Creator/HenryKuttner and Creator/CLMoore) starts with a post-scientist in the far future testing a TimeMachine by sending two boxes of toys into the past; he loses track of them, and considers the test a failure. The first box is discovered in the 20th Century, by Scott and Emma Paradine, who by playing with them, quickly begin thinking in a very ''different'' way. Their parents and other adults cannot comprehend the odd toys. It's explained that the children are not actually increasing their intelligence, but the toys are conditioning them to "non-Euclidean" reasoning; only a child's mind and way of thinking are flexible enough to accommodate or comprehend it because adults have lived their entire lives "conditioned to Euclid". Elsewhere (and, else-when) the second box is found in the 19th Century by young Alice Liddell. She can only barely understand the written material, being slightly older than Scott and Emma, but when describing it to her friend "Uncle Charles" (Lewis Carroll) he finds it interesting and says he'll include them in one of his works. In the main story, the two siblings not only figure out the scientist's original experiment, but why it failed, and construct a device to leave their space-time dimension. A copy of ''Literature/ThroughTheLookingGlass'' is discovered by their parents, the odd title of the story (a line from ''Jabberwocky'' the missing piece used to complete the time-space equation. This is ''not'' to be confused with ''Film/TheLastMimzy'' which is very loosely based on this original work.

* In ''WesternAnimation/RiseOfTheGuardian'': While everyone who believes in the Guardians can see them, including adults, and if someone doesn't believe in them they can't see them, even if they're a kid, this trope still applies in that the Guardians explicitly only protect children, and every light on the globe represents a ''child'' who believes.

* ''{{Transformers}}: Cybertron'': When the parents offered to accompany their children into space to do battle with the Deceptions, it was explained that only the open minds and hearts of children could really comprehend what was going on out there, and that however much the parents ''wanted'' to believe in their own ability to understand the situation, only the children really could.

* In ''Acorna's Quest'' by Anne [=McCaffery=] and Margaret Ball, children can see the true form of the Linyaari, even when they are projecting something completely different. It's stated that children of any species are psychically undeveloped.

* The little girls in Zilpha Keatley Snyder's ''The Changeling'' believe that "babies are born knowing all sorts of magic stuff, until they start thinking separately and forget everything." They rely on a baby sister as a kind of [[ChildMage oracle/talisman]]. Snyder's subsequent ''[[Literature/GreenSkyTrilogy Green-Sky]]'' fantasy trilogy builds on this idea, then inverts it: infants have ESP but the fact that powers are lost with maturity isn't a cute bit of Wordsworthian nostalgia but a symptom of what's literally wrecking the culture.

* Cliff [=McNish=]
** ''The Doomspell Trilogy'': by the end of the second book, the "magic" inside of every child the world over had been unleashed giving most of them the ability to do just about anything, from fly, to change their hair colour, to kill people. Each child possessed a varying level of ability, but they all had it, more or less. This magic faded away as the child aged into adulthood.
** ''Silver Sequence'': children all over the world develop powers and change physically (often in some borderline BodyHorror ways) in response to a fast-approaching alien threat.

* Scott Christian Sava's ''Dreamland Chronicles'': only children can enter the world of dreams. The random appearance and disappearance of human children from their world is taken in stride by the inhabitants, and people begin to appear there less and less as they age. This is a familiar trope across many fictions dealing with a DreamLand.

Contrast EnfanteTerrible.

* ''Anime/SerialExperimentsLain'' has a bizarre subversion of this, with a scientist harnessing the ESP of thousands upon thousands of children in an attempt to digitise reality. The children didn't get the better part of that deal.

* ''{{Transformers}}: Cybertron'': When the parents offered to accompany their children into space to do battle with the Deceptions, it was explained that only the open minds and hearts of children could really comprehend what was going on out there, and that however much the parents ''wanted'' to believe in their own ability to understand the situation, only the children really could.

* Creator/StephenKing's novels often make a point about how children are better suited to dealing with the supernatural - they can accept it easier than most adults, due to a grown-up's mind being set in the ways about the nature of the 'real world'. Additionally, the titular monster of ''Literature/{{IT}}'' claims that only children can use the power of belief and Chud to stop it. The grown-up protagonists prove it wrong, but this may be to do with the fact that they had defeated it once as children already.

* OlderThanFeudalism: In ''Literature/TheBible'', UsefulNotes/{{Jesus}} tells the disciples not to turn away a group of parents hoping to have their children blessed by him because one cannot enter to the kingdom of heaven without being like a child. (That is, eager to learn and open to trying something new and accepting new ideas that might sound crazy to some.)

* ''Literature/EndersGame'' is probably somewhat of a subversion. If a child's trained from a young age in Battle School, then they can become as good a commander as an adult, and can learn how to understand the Buggers-- [[spoiler:but someone who really understood the buggers couldn't slaughter them, and so the commander needed to be tricked into thinking that the battles against the buggers were a simulation, not real combat with real casualties. Children were selected because they'd be naive enough not to suspect the battles were real]]. Which means that yes, children have the trait needed, but it's not necessarily a positive one.
* In ''Acorna's Quest'' by Anne [=McCaffery=] and Margaret Ball, children can see the true form of the Linyaari, even when they are projecting something completely different. It's stated that children of any species are psychically undeveloped.
* The little girls in Zilpha Keatley Snyder's ''The Changeling'' believe that "babies are born knowing all sorts of magic stuff, until they start thinking separately and forget everything." They rely on a baby sister as a kind of [[ChildMage oracle/talisman]]. Snyder's subsequent ''[[Literature/GreenSkyTrilogy Green-Sky]]'' fantasy trilogy builds on this idea, then inverts it: infants have ESP but the fact that powers are lost with maturity isn't a cute bit of Wordsworthian nostalgia but a symptom of what's literally wrecking the culture.

* A somewhat twisted version in the ''Literature/KnightAndRogueSeries''. In general humans are the only species without magic, only having weak abilities like vague senses, but there are some children who can use magic. Children only, becuase only simple children can use magic, and between their powers and their mental impairments and whatever other health problems come with they never last to adulthood.
* In Creator/DevonMonk's ''Literature/DeadIron'', [=LeFel=] abducted a four-year-old to act as his dreamer.
* Many interesting essays about why ChildrenAreSpecial, ChildrenAreInnocent and GrowingUpSucks were written in Victorian times. [[https://books.google.com/books?id=E7ozAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA143#v=onepage&q&f=false Here's one, 'The Age of Gold', by folklorist Dinah Craik]] who compiled books of fairytales and wrote novels for kids and adults. Rev. Francis Jacox has an essay specifically about kids WorldBuilding, often later growing up to be authors, "[[https://books.google.com/books?id=DyNLAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA68#v=onepage&q&f=false Glimpses of Daydream-Land]]", in a Dickensian periodical.

* In ''TabletopGame/MonstersAndOtherChildishThings'' only children have monsters... with the exception of an incredibly creepy old man who didn't grow up. It's implied this is because monsters, being immortal, don't really change, and tend to be more childish than the kid in the first place, so the kid outgrows them.

* On ''WesternAnimation/TheFlintstones'', Fred and Barney are [[InvisibleToNormals usually the only ones who can see]] the Great Gazoo, but Pebbles and Bam-Bam can see him, because they believe in him.
* In ''WesternAnimation/DiGataDefenders'', in the episode "the lost children", a man known as the Professor, is searching in a mine for evidence that Ra Dosians are descendants of interstellar travellers. But in the mines is a virus that is deadly to adults, but children are immune to the virus. So the Professor kidnaps children and forces them to work in the mines.
* The characters on ''WesternAnimation/{{Kaeloo}}'' live in a world called Smileyland where ThereAreNoAdults because only children are allowed to access the place because of their belief in magic and their [[ChildrenAreInnocent innocence]].

* OlderThanFeudalism: In ''Literature/TheBible'', UsefulNotes/{{Jesus}} tells the disciples not to turn away a group of parents hoping to have their children blessed by him because one cannot enter to the kingdom of heaven without being like a child... [[WildMassGuessing whatever that's supposed to mean]].

* In ''TabletopGame/Pokethulhu'' only children are capable of dealing with the thullu without going completely insane or running away in terror.

* The short story ''Mimsy Were the Borogoves'' by Lewis Padgett (a pseudonym of Creator/HenryKuttner and Creator/CLMoore) starts with a post-scientist in the far future testing a TimeMachine by sending two boxes of toys into the past; he loses track of them, and considers the test a failure. The first box is discovered in the 20th Century, by Scott and Emma Paradine, who by playing with them, quickly begin thinking in a very ''different'' way. Their parents and other adults cannot comprehend the odd toys. It's explained that the children are not actually increasing their intelligence, but the toys are conditioning them to "non-Euclidean" reasoning; only a child's mind and way of thinking are flexible enough to accommodate or comprehend it because adults have lived their entire lives "conditioned to Euclid". Elsewhere (and, else-when) the second box is found in the 19th Century by young Alice Liddell. She can only barely understand the written material, being slightly older than Scott and Emma, but when describing it to her friend "Uncle Charles" (Lewis Carroll) he finds it interesting and says he'll include them in one of his works. In the main story, the two siblings not only figure out the scientist's original experiment, but why it failed, and construct a device to leave their space-time dimension. A copy of ''Literature/ThroughTheLookingGlass'' is discovered by their parents, the odd title of the story (a line from ''Jabberwocky'' the missing piece used to complete the time-space equation. This is ''not'' to be confused with ''Film/TheLastMimsy'' which is very loosely based on this original work.

* The short story ''Mimsy Were the Borogoves'' by Lewis Padgett (a pseudonym of Creator/HenryKuttner and Creator/CLMoore) starts with a post-scientist in the far future testing a TimeMachine by sending two boxes of toys into the past; he loses track of them, and considers the test a failure. The first box is discovered in the 20th Century, by the two child protagonists of the story, who by playing with them, quickly begin thinking in a very ''different'' way. Their parents and other adults cannot comprehend the odd toys. It's explained that the children are not actually increasing their intelligence, but the toys are conditioning them to "non-Euclidean" reasoning; only a child's mind and way of thinking are flexible enough to accommodate or comprehend it. Elsewhere (and, else-when) the second box is found in the 19th Century by young Alice Liddel. She can only barely understand the written material, being in her teenage years, but when describing it to her friend "Uncle Charles" (Lewis Carroll) he finds it interesting and says he'll include them in one of his works. In the main story, the two siblings not only figure out the scientist's original experiment, but why it failed, and construct a device to leave their space-time dimension. A copy of ''Literature/ThroughTheLookingGlass'' is discovered by their parents, the odd title of the story (a line from ''Jabberwocky'' the missing piece used to complete the time-space equation.

* The short story ''Mimsy Were the Borogoves'' by Lewis Padgett (a pseudonym of Creator/HenryKuttner and Creator/CLMoore) starts with a post-scientist in the far future testing a TimeMachine by sending two boxes of toys into the past; he loses them, and considers the test a failure. The first box is discovered in the 20th Century, by the two child protagonists of the story, who by playing with them, quickly grow smarter. Their parents and other adults cannot comprehend the odd toys, because only a child's mind and way of thinking can comprehend them. Elsewhere (and, else-when) the second box is found in the 19th Century by young Alice Liddel. She can only barely understand the written material, being in her teenage years, but when describing it to her friend Charles Dodgson (better known today as Lewis Carroll) he finds it interesting and says he'll include them in one of his works. In the main story, the two siblings not only figure out the scientist's original experiment, but why it failed, and construct a device to leave the mortal world. A copy of ''Literature/ThroughTheLookingGlass'' is discovered by their parents, the odd title of the story (a line from ''Jabberwocky'' the missing piece used to complete the time-space equation.

* ''VideoGame/TheSecretWorld'' plays this darkly in Issue 7: "A Dream to Kill". It's revealed that the [[MegaCorp Orochi Group]] scientist [[MadScientist Doctor Schreber]] is a firm believer in this trope...hence the reason why his test subjects are almost exclusively children. Reasoning that children are more adaptable than adults--even citing an incident when his four-year-old granddaughter taught him how to to use a new function on his smartphone--he goes so far as to test [[spoiler: the effects of demonic possession, mutant spores, ghosts, lycanthropy, and even the Filth]] on them. And terrifyingly enough, this approach garners results: [[spoiler: it turns out that the only reason why werewolves transform into their traditional form is because, as adults, they're under the subconscious influence of millennia worth of folklore and genetic memory. The children that Schreber infected with lycanthropy weren't old enough to be influenced, so their transformations are much more varied--hence the boss battle with the child-creature earlier in the issue. He notes to experiment with vamprism next]].

* In Pokethullu only children are capable of dealing with the thullu without going completely insane or running away in terror.