There have been a number of recent developments impacting on the field of early childhood education that suggest it might be timely to re-examine our understandings of children and childhood. Events such as the development of mandated curriculum for the non-compulsory years, the implementation of diagnostic tools and assessment regimes in the first years of school, and moral panic over paedophilia are all underpinned by certain views of the child and ideals of childhood. This article explores how three dominant constructions of the child embedded in early childhood policy and practice are problematic, particularly in terms of power relationships and agency for the child and how they may constrain the possibilities in early childhood curriculum. The analysis concludes that taking a critical perspective on these childhood images helps reveal hidden assumptions and creates an opportunity for new kinds of images that offer alternative positions to the child as an active social agent and re-orient early childhood curriculum towards its transformational possibilities.