In light of the more or less recent renaissance of child and childhood studies, children and childhood have received renewed critical attention. Despite this contemporary appeal, however, conventional and often sentimental viewpoints, ideas and concepts prevail when it comes to those we call children. Western thought about children and childhood remains dominated by a developmental, binary logic that juxtaposes children against adults: children are deemed to be innocent, naive and asexual as opposed to the experienced, rational and sexual adult. This binary logic includes the teleology of ‘growing up’ in which children, understood as future adults, are said to undergo a stage-delineated process of maturation that prepares them for being the adult they are supposed to become. On their ascent to adulthood, children are expected to cast off their vulnerable, needy, naive child-identity and to adopt an adult-identity once they have successfully navigated the space that lies in-between childhood and adulthood: adolescence. The binary placement that dominates this thought about children and childhood is set within a continuous developmental framework from child to adult whose built-in discontinuities play out in adolescence: no longer a child, not yet an adult. Herein, the centredness on children serves to camouflage an adultcentrism that makes sure that children grow up to the status quo of the adult in order to safeguard and to repeat this binary logic, and to once again maintain a child's development towards an adult.

The cultural dominance of this developmental model comprises family theories that posit the family as the primary child-rearing and healthgiving unit which children grow up to replicate by having a family of their own. The model of the nuclear heterosexual family here prevails, as Virginia L. Blum has noted,

Validating its theories of the child within a widespread cultural acceptance of the nuclear heterosexual family unit as the structure which forms the child, psychoanalysis insists on the legitimacy of the Oedipal (heterosexual) family to endorse its own operational agenda. Psychoanalysis, particularly the work of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein, is the discourse that is most focused on the child.