Hanna, Kirsten2025-01-302025-01-302024-12-11Childhood, ISSN: 0907-5682 (Print); 1461-7013 (Online), SAGE Publications, OnlineFirst. doi: 10.1177/090756822412891930907-56821461-7013http://hdl.handle.net/10292/18565If it is dehumanising to refer to an adult with it, why is it applied happily to their children? The use of the neuter pronoun it to refer to children is an understudied aspect of English pronoun use. This paper explores this usage in the Aotearoa/NZ news media. It shows that the pronoun is used in more contexts than the literature suggests and there may be diverse motivations for its adoption. Irrespective of speaker intentions, this usage may contribute to deficit views of children, portraying them as lesser humans through association with the non-human entities to which it typically refers.© The Author(s) 2024. Creative Commons License (CC BY 4.0). This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the Sage and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/39 Education50 Philosophy and Religious Studies44 Human SocietyPediatric13 Education16 Studies in Human Society22 Philosophy and Religious StudiesSocial Work39 Education44 Human society50 Philosophy and religious studiesJournal ArticleOpenAccess10.1177/09075682241289193