Available in bookstores on April 29.

The original desire was noble—"I want the best for my children"—and the rest was the logical consequence, once we had the necessary means: monitoring their relationships, providing them with edifying reading material, and building a bright future for them. Thus, children have become just another possession of their parents, who, as Santiago Gerchunoff says, "feel an obsessive responsibility to educate them, to improve them, to mold them. We confuse, in fact, raising them with molding them."

Starting with everyday scenes—the school WhatsApp group, the father speaking English to his son in the park, the baby monitored like a Tamagotchi—the first essays in this book trace a critique of an era that, even when speaking of love and care, is obsessed with control, performance, and perfection. In the second part, the author explores children's and young adult fiction as a refuge and adventure, far removed from any pedagogical intent: stories as "a way to continue loving, caring, and playing beyond all obligation, all pretense."

In the age of children as things It is a book that goes against the grain, which aims to dismantle, with a sense of humor, the dominant logic that turns parenting into a business and children into projects that can be optimized.