Last month a hotelier praised the first communion dress of an eight-year-old, telling her she looked lovely. "Are you hitting on me?" she riposted. In the same month, Declan Kiberd heard of a boy whose confirmation gift included a share in an apartment in Croatia.
Are there children any more, or just fast-track apprentice adults? There was a time when "education" was supposed by Romantic writers to address the essential nature of the child; but these days it seems to have been replaced by mere "schooling" - a process designed to hurry kids on into becoming adult.
Ever since the Shirley Temple and Bugsy Malone films, cuteness in a certain kind of American child has been equated with precociousness - learning to talk, dress and act like grown-ups, whether nubile starlets or flashy criminals. The sexualisation of pre-teenagers on MTV proceeds without any notable restraint.
Things were different back in the nineteenth century. The long apprenticeship to adult codes consumed most of the secondary school years. In the United States the median age of menstruation in the 1830s was 17½; by 1900 it had fallen to 15; it is now between 12 and 13.
Is there today a demarcation point between the child and the adult? People used to think of "innocence" as something lost in some careless half-hour in the late teens or early 20s. But not any more.
In the United States, back in the 1990s, a 12-year-old child literally sued his parents for divorce. Of course, he didn't really initiate the action. His adult relations and lawyers got him to do it. But, nevertheless, the court treated him as the applicant. Children are now aware that they have rights as never before: not to be hurt, beaten, abused. Yet childhood itself seems more precarious than ever.
The anxieties of adults about their world are constantly projected on to images of outraged children, whether the photo is of a child terrified by a football riot or a sectarian clash, it seems an icon of a lost communal innocence.
Yet this is also the era in which 30 is the new 15. The keenest of all purchasers and players of a video game like Grand Theft Auto are often not boys but adult males. The child-like adult now appears daily in our culture alongside the adult-like child. Adults dress up in playful costumes at Halloween, as do sports fans at all main events. Mothers and daughters become indistinguishable on fashion ads. And we have had a spate of films about the young man who fancies the mother even more than he wants the daughter who introduced him to her.
The phenomenon of the "child adult" isn't new. A few decades ago, the boys who sold newspapers on Dublin streets often had the faces of wizened, exhausted men. In Christian art, which did so much to popularise the idea of holy childhood, the infant Jesus often has the face and body of a boy but the musculature of a mature man. Jesus was himself a sort of Bugsy Malone, who distressed his loving parents by straying away from home at the age of 12 and preaching ancient wisdom to elders in the temple. And the religion which he brought was itself ambivalent: the child had potential for holiness, but was born a sinner, already "fallen".
JM Barrie, who knew about these things, said in Peter Pan that "the age of two is the beginning of the end". He wrote after a century which had begun with the image of the Unspoilt Child but ended with Freud's Theory of Infantile Sexuality.
Nevertheless, from the time of Jesus, childhood has been a symbol of traditional values felt to be in jeopardy, of a world of green fields and enchanted gardens under threat. Hence the power of the child as accuser. This was embodied by writers like William Blake and Charles Dickens in works of art, which led to reforms in the working conditions of chimney-sweeps and juvenile labourers. That same tradition is also beginning at long last to find significant effect in the law of many lands.
What is being explored in the worldwide debate about law is a much wider set of anxieties about culture - about dysfunctional families, children dressed as adults, the strange phenomenon of millionaire child sports stars, pop idols who refuse to grow up. The darkest fear of all is the one that haunts every family sitting-room - of ready access by children to all that may be seen on the internet, from ritual beheadings to hard porn.
There was a time when children were screened from all kinds of "adult knowledge", but now many can access almost anything by clicking on to a computer. Some kids in recent years have used picture phones to take and publish cruel photographs of one another. These are rightly banned in schools, yet future historians may find that the censored images reflect corruptions in the "adult" use of technology.
Children always want to know more than adults think fitting. The child's world is, in some ways, an independent republic for which theologians, lawyers and teachers legislate as best they can. All we can say for sure is that when adults call the shots, it is often adult agendas which are being followed and adult interests which are being pursued.