Culture and Society – Children's Design International Collection, registered charity, Canada BN 770946317 RR0001

World Children’s Day 2025

November 20^th is World Children’s Day. In other words, the World Children’s Rights Day, because annually it marks the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989.

We join everyone who helps “amplify children’s voices” as UNICEF puts it.

On the UNICEF’s web site and social media, you will see a huge amount of photographs of children, usually with a mention of their first name and country. Looking at these portraits, you may wonder what these children would actually say about their living conditions. Little is revealed about the context of the photographs, and usually nothing about the photographers. What we are implicitly asked to do is to see how the images fit into the narratives of the articles and media posts.

We invite you to join us in celebrating those who document, record, preserve, and share children’s experiences and stories, as children tell them. They are the people who amplify children’s voices, and make room for them in society.

In this spirit, we share below a photograph, by an anonymous photographer, of a photographer famous for photographing anonymous children: Lewis Hines.

We also like to celebrate with you the people behind the Lewis Hines Project at the Lawrence History Center, in Massachusetts, who unearthed the stories of the real life children captured by Hines’ lenses. This is dedication to giving children their voices back at its best.

The issues the convention on children’s rights raises are many, and each as pressing as the others. Among them, we invite you to learn more about the continued devastating impact of child labour. In a report released earlier this year, Child Labour: Global estimates 2024, trends and the road forward, UNICEF and the International Labour Organization (ILO) estimate that nearly 138 million children are working, often in dangerous conditions. That is a lot of people denied their childhood, or education opportunities. While UNICEF reports a significant decrease in child labour over the past twenty five years, it nonetheless admits to a global failure to eliminate it altogether.

The ILO has long been an advocate in the fight against child labour. Interestingly, though, young adults suffer scandalously high unemployment rates across the globe. This has been the case for decades. It is one thing to fight child labour, but what about helping young adult enter the job market? Labour organizations seem clueless on how to curb systemic barriers that prevent new generations of workers at entry level. See some recent World Bank alarming statistics. But that is another story.

**Lewis Hines photographing children**, c1910. Source: Eastman Museum, NY, 2025.

Making it memorable

Before I forget, the Semaine de la Mémoire begins tomorrow in Strasbourg, France. It is the sixth edition of this initiative by l’Observatoire B2V des mémoires, itself mainly supported by Groupe B2V, a social protection organization in France.

What a great idea to bring together experts in current research about memory, and allow them to meet the general public.

The program includes two conferences specific to children and adolescents. One will be presented this Tuesday September 30^th, by, Carmen Schröder, professor of child and adolescent psychiatry, et Julie Rolling, child and adolescent psychiatrist: Sommeil, rythmes et mémoire chez les adolescents et les jeunes adultes (Sleep, Rythms and memory in teenagers and young adults).

The other, La mémoire au service des apprentissages: ce que nous dit la recherche (Memory use in learning: what’s science tells us), will be presented the following day by Nathalie Gavens, researcher in psychology of education, et Sonia Lorant, lecturer in cognitive psychology.

***Mnemosyne, Mother of the Muses***. By Frederic Leighton, 1830-1896. Source: **Sotheby’s**, 27 September 2025.

The pencil lead that never was

Once upon a long time ago, a mistake went on for centuries, even though almost everyone knew it was a mistake. Pencil lead is still a commonly used expression, while it is widely known to be a misnomer.

The truth is, the familiar small wooden writing tools have at their core a blend of graphite and clay.

Graphite is the first victim of this unfortunate mistake. Its resemblance to lead is to be blamed. When discovered in England in 1560, it was named “plumbago”. The term is still in use in industry and refers to pure graphite. The color is really the only trait that graphite shares with the toxic heavy metal. In 1779, a Swedish chemist ultimately let the world know that graphite was made of carbon, not a metal. Almost twenty years later, French chemist Nicholas Jacques Conté patented the process used to make the pencils we know to this day.

We must acknowledge that the error in naming graphite was made in good faith. The fact that writing tools made of lead had been in use from Antiquity through the Middle Ages likely contributed to the mistake.

While it can be justified and forgiven, setting things right is no less the thing to do. So, let’s stop using an expression which we know to be misleading. My pencil is not toxic. What about yours? Find more about pencils by visiting the California Cedar Products website. For an in-depth, illustrated book about writing tools in Antiquity, see Anna Willi’s book, Manual of Roman everyday writing tools, Vol. 2, accessible Research Gate.

***A pencil tip***. Source: Wikipedia, 20 September, 2025.

Many ways to make waves

The National Volunteer Week is on in Canada, and we would like to add our voice in celebrating the amazing contributions that volunteers are making every day to enrich our collective experience. We could not do without their commitment and generosity.

Take this opportunity to visit our recruitment page and to browse our online collection. Make sure to find your way to make waves with us.

If boating makes waves, at CDIC we know how to preserve children’s take on boating fun. The Red and Green Boat below was drawn nearly sixty years ago in a school notebook. The young artist made sure the whole boat was visible, propeller included.

CDIC’s Volunteer Canada 2025 NVW campaign.

Children and Society : Call for abstracts

You have a research report to publish? Children and Society : The International Journal of Childhood and Children’s Services is calling you. Published by the National Children’s Bureau (UK), there are only three weeks left to submit your abstract for the Children in the archives issue.

It is encouraging to see journal publishers paying more attention to and joining the conversation about the urgent need to preserve children’s artifacts.

This call for abstracts comes a few months only after the publication of an issue of Archives and Records (Volume 45, issue 3, 2024) dedicated to the role of archives in engaging children and preserving their social and historical contributions.

Noodles shine on

You will not let kids play with raw meat and make a meat dress for a doll (hello Jana Sterbak and Lady gaga). You will however provide dry noodles for safely making playful jewelry.

Noodle jewels have been around for generations. It is fun and combined with other materials, like beads, fabric, dye, and pompoms, it can get wildly creative.

You will find a simple method to dye your noodles in this Youtube video: How to dye Pasta Noodles for Craft. See great models published by Mum’s Grapevine, an Australian blog.

Interestingly, while children have been emulating grown ups’ jewelry, a jeweler has in turn emulated children’s love for noodle art. Check out this commercial collection of “real” jewels: Al Dente – Delicacies Jewelry. This company runs a philanthropic program for the fight against hunger.

Finally, as one of our Pinterest albums goes “Do play with your food.

Pasta. Source: Wikimedia, 29 January 2025.

RShop team completes study

At the beginning of 2024, CDIC reached out to the McMaster University’s Office of Community Engagement (OCE), requesting support in researching some of the hypothetical factors related to the decision to contribute (or not) to CDIC’s collection. In no time, the OCE had a dynamic team put together under their Research Shop program.

The multidisciplinary team, led by Syed Mahamad, included Hamza Abouiznied, Mia Brufatto, Lily Li, and Lina Mabayyed undertook to identify motivations and barriers influencing the preservation of children’s artwork by families, and contributions to CDIC. Understanding these factors is crucial to increase CDIC’s ability to educate the public on the significance of children’s art and preserve it for future generations.

In total, 113 participants aged between 18 and 64 completed the online survey, and all Canadian provinces plus three territories were represented.

The team produced a report filled with never before documented insights on children’s art conservation as personal, family, or cultural heritage. Ninety (80%) of the survey participants reported that their parents saved their artwork when they were children, is but one such insight.

The study reveals that the main motivations for preserving children’s artwork within the home are:

Tracking the child’s artistic and personal development
Appreciating the artwork’s aesthetic value, and
Maintaining emotional connections to the pieces.

By far, the biggest barriers to preserving artwork in the home were a lack of space to physically store the artwork and time constraints.

Regarding contributing to the CDIC archive, the main motivating factors were:

The opportunity to share and celebrate the artwork with a broader audience,
The child desires to contribute to the archive, and
Receiving incentives, including crediting the child as the artist and/or small giveaways.

Factors that discouraged participants from contributing to the archive included:

A lack of knowledge about the CDIC and its mission,
Perceived logistical challenges with the artwork submission process, and
Reluctance within the family to part with the original artwork.

The research team included recommendations based on their findings. The new knowledge emerging from the study will help CDIC to review its communication tools, as well as its collection development strategies.

At this point, it seems that CDIC should simultaneously address the need of families that seek as much exposure as possible for their images, and the need of families that prefer a restrained access limited only for archival and research purposes.

Stay tuned to see how CDIC will adapt for better serve contributing families, and reach out to other collection users. For the great project partnership, CDIC would like to thank the research team, as well as Evan Gravely and the Office of Community Engagement, at McMaster University.

***Reasons why participants were interested in contributing to the CDIC archive***. Source: McMaster University, 2024.

It smells like dinosaur

From Godzilla to Barney, and all the Jurassic Park sequels in between, it is safe to say that almost every kid has drawn a dinosaur or two at some point.

The bones of real dinosaurs are preserved and displayed all over the world. They help us understand and admire their bygone animal supremacy.

Did you know that specialists also care for their feces? Yes, dinosaur poop has its own museum! Well, actually a museum for feces that have mineralized, and turned into coprolites.

The Poozeum was first launched as an online resource in 2014, by its founder George Frandsen. Ten years later, it recently opened its physical gallery and storefront in Williams, Arizona, not far from the Grand Canyon. Poozeum holds the largest of such collections, with about 8,000 coprolites. It holds a Guinness World Record for it, and also for holding the largest coprolite (67,5 cm x 15,7 cm) ever found, which George Frandsen says likely comes from a T.rex.

Next time you draw a dinosaur, don’t you forget its coprolite. Who knows, maybe one day we will find out that the whole planet is but one humongous spinning orbiting coprolite, or a derivative thereof.

**Founder George Frandsen strikes the pose at the Poozeum**. Source: Poozeum, 2024.

A take on family estrangement

Building a collection such as CDIC’s often means bumping into difficult questions and hurdles. Children’s drawings have nearly all vanished for centuries, even millennia. There are basically two reasons for that. One is that there is little value attached to them, and by extension children, because of the temporary nature of childhood. Either they grow too fast, or we just cannot wait for them to grow up. The other reason is that even if great value is given to learning and art made by children, it is generally a personal value shared and enjoyed in private among family members, not with the community. It is for the family scrapbook only.

In our efforts to expand the conversation about preservation, we wonder what triggers some individuals and some parents to hang on to those fragile objects. We also ask ourselves, is there a best time for families to contribute items to the collection? It is hard to say. The best time is probably when both the parent and the child agree to let the original image leave home. That is in the case of a young child. If the child has become an adult and has childhood art, likely preserved by a parent, this person may have lost interest in the image, or may want to honor the parent who kept it safe.

When a family keeps child art pieces for a long time, it looks like a positive sign for their preservation. It likely means that the initial impulse sprung from a strong bond between the child and the parent. It could however turn out to be the opposite, and the longer a family keeps the art, the more endangered it becomes. This is because like any other relationships, family bonds can fluctuate over time.

Adult children sometime grow apart from their parents or their siblings. When this happens, physical objects that they shared in the past come to take different meanings. The value and meaning of any art from childhood change, and may become dispensable. Family estrangement, when it happens, can put conservation of children’s art at risk.

The decision to preserve or not children’s art is and will remain in the hands of individuals and parents. Our participatory approach to collection development aims to add a collective or community layer to the equation. Our hope is that this will stimulate dialogue between generations, and cultural awareness.

Family estrangement has been under the scrutiny of a small number of scholars over the past ten years. They inform us that several factors can bring family members to stop interacting with one another. Family members can keep their distances for various periods of time, from a few months, to years, or for life. They can sometime grow apart gradually, without even explicitly knowing why. A pioneer on the subject is Dr. Kylie Agllias, adjunct lecturer at the University of NewCastle, in Australia. Her book Family estrangement: A matter of perspective (Routledge, 2016) is a go to reference. Gerontologist Dr.Karl Pillemer of Cornell University also authored the book Fault lines: Fractured families and how to mend them (Penguin, 2022). His book has a significant portion on resilience and reconciliation. In 2015, the British organization Stand Alone conducted a groundbreaking survey. Over eight hundred people responded. Their findings were published in the report by psychologist Dr. Lucy Blake, of the Centre for Family Research at University of Cambridge: Hidden voices: Family estrangement in adulthood, and available online. It is most revealing of some aspects of modern life.

***Family members***. By Léo, c1969s. Source: CDIC-CIDE.

April fool for real

Will an April 1^st come when pranks and their fools will go unnoticed? Maybe we have already reached this point.

In recent years, we have seen the proliferation of fake news, as well as reciprocal foreign interference through social media. Add to this the several armed conflicts across the globe, of which many say the first victim is truth itself.

We thought we would make things real this year, by sharing our April Fools image with you. The pencil drawing was made in Quebec, during World War II. It is a long standing French tradition to stick a small fish on the back of an unsuspecting victim on April 1^st. Interestingly, it was not preserved by the young girl who made it, nor by her mother, but rather by her older sister. It is now part of Lisette Tremblay’s fonds in our collection.