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This article provides an analysis of the techniques, methods, materials, and discourses of child study observation to illuminate its role in the sociohistorical colonization of childhood. Through analysis of key texts it explains how early 20th-century child study provided for the transcendence of historical, racial, and social contexts for understanding human development. The colonizing project of child study promoted the advancement of Eurocentric culture through a generic "White" development. What a child is and can be, and the meaning of childhood has been disembodied through observation, record keeping, and analytical processes in which time and space are abstracted from behavior, and development symbolized as a universal ideal.

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Representations of nonhuman wild animals in children's stories and toys underwent dramatic transformation over the years . During the earlier part of that period, wild animals were presented to children as being savage and dangerous, and that it was necessary for them to be killed or brutally constrained. In the 1890s, an animalcentric discourse emerged in Nature writing, along with an animal-human symbiosis in scientifi c child study that highlighted childhood innocence, resulting in a valuing of wild animals based upon their similarity to humans. Th is article will describe the aesthetic devices of children's stories and play materials in relation to the dominant, emerging, and residual ideas about the wild communicated by adults to children through these means.

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