Mailing address:

(1995) drew attention to the effects that political and macroeconomic poli-cies have on children. She was concerned with the effects of globalization on children in the North, whose childhoods have become highly individualized, commodified and stratified. But she saw also that it is in the South that chil-dren have become the most vulnerable victims of global economic policies. Stephens claimed that one way in which macroeconomic policies came to be legitimized was through the invocation of simplified and idealized notions of childhood, family and community, in order to justify actions that may in reality damage the lives of real children. These idealized notions are usually drawn from a model of affluent, white, middle-class households in the indus-trialized world, and are likely to be as unreal in their application to the North as to the South (Stephens, 1997a). These themes, the effects of macroeconomic policies on children and their justification by referring to distorted notions of childhood, family and community have prompted this article, which focuses in particular on the World Bank and its support for early childhood. I attempt to demonstrate how the Bank pursues policies that are detrimental to the interest of children while at the same time claiming to be promoting their interests. The Ban