The Not-Yet of Childhood

How are we to understand the idea that childhood is a “world out-of-time,” or “indifferent to history?” Are not children subject to time and to history more so than adults? Everyone has seen that three-year-old who is more computer-literate than their millennial parent—the so-called digital native. Is not this literacy precisely an example of history (the smartphone) bearing down upon the child’s psyche in ways that they (or we) cannot yet anticipate? And is not this child subject to the giant and alien structures of language spiraling across millennia—into the past and future—in ways that they (or we) cannot yet understand? True enough and yet is it not clear that the “not yet” of these questions is precisely what makes childhood childhood? Is not this “not yet” the very structure of childhood? The “deferred action” that allows the child to remain indifferent to history, even while they are inscribed by it?