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In Some Thoughts Concerning Education, John Locke (1693) emphasized the child's capacity to be educated, to have its pure and ready mind shaped and developed. In Émile or on Education, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762), himself influenced by Locke, celebrated the child's original naturalness and innocence, though he saw both as threatened by the corrupting influences of society and culture. This picture of the pure and blissful child was popularized by the poet Wordsworth (1807), especially in his “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” where he depicted the child as father to the man but also some holy prophet and blessed seer about to be corrupted by civilization and by language.
The image of the innocent child so influenced by Rousseau and the Romantics, and still largely held today, had to be integrated with and withstand Freud's depiction of the child as a sexual creature with an unconscious fantasy world replete with desire, aggression, and conflict. Although the reconciliation has not been an easy one, children in film, from Shirley Temple in Little Miss Marker through Jonathan Lipnicki in Jerry MeGuire , have largely remained innocent and good-though often caught in difficult and painful situations. The specific conflict between the images of Rousseau's and Freud's child is generally resolved in the cinema by depicting the child as innocent and wholesome while projecting the internal forces that children have to deal with onto the external world, in the forms of the objects that surround the child and the actions that involve him or her. The conflict between the child and the surrounding world represent the child's internal conflicts, and the resolution