Think of the children
a cliché that evolved into a rhetorical tactic
"Think of the children" (also "What about the children?") is a cliché that evolved into a rhetorical tactic. In the literal sense, it refers to children's rights (as in discussions of child labor). In debate, it is a plea for pity that is used as an appeal to emotion, and therefore may become a logical fallacy.
History
Art, Argument, and Advocacy (2002) argued that the appeal substitutes emotion for reason in debate. Ethicist Jack Marshall wrote in 2005 that the phrase's popularity stems from its capacity to stunt rationality, particularly discourse on morals. "Think of the children" has been invoked by censorship proponents to shield children from perceived danger. Community, Space and Online Censorship (2009) argued that classifying children in an infantile manner, as innocents in need of protection, is a form of obsession over the concept of purity. A 2011 article in the Journal for Cultural Research observed that the phrase grew out of a moral panic.
It was an exhortation in the 1964 Disney film Mary Poppins, when the character of Mrs. Banks pleaded with her departing nanny not to quit and to "think of the children!" The phrase was popularized as a satiric reference on the animated television program The Simpsons in 1996, when character Helen Lovejoy pleaded variations of "Will someone please think of the children?" multiple times during a contentious debate by citizens of the fictional town of Springfield.
“Think of the children” enters the record as a cliché that evolved into a rhetorical tactic. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Think, children and cliché can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5098257. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2002, 2005, 2009 and 2011.
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This entry incorporates text from “Think of the children” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.