From a wonderful story to the no-nonsense facts: affect, knowledge and sexual citizenship in pedagogical texts for young children and their parents.

This paper performs a textual analysis on three popular children's picture books that describe the ‘facts of life’. It positions the books, published over a 60-year period, as components of a broader pedagogical apparatus incorporating texts, parents, children and experts in particular spatial and temporal locations. It traces movements of affect, rationality, scientificity and sexual citizenship through and between the picture books, and considers how these textual components of the pedagogical apparatus construct young children as particular subjects and objects of knowledge in sex education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]