In the conclusion of The Child to Come, the book asks, ‘What happens when the life figured by the child--innocent, self-similar human life at home on a homely Earth--no longer has the strength to hold back the vitality that animates it?’ This chapter looks at two kinds of texts that consider this question: Anthropocene cinema and Young Adult Fiction. By focusing on the role of human action, the Anthropocene obscures a far more threatening reality: the collapse of the regulative. In relation, both children’s literature and young adult literature grow out of and as disciplinary apparatuses trained on that fraught transit between the presumptive difference of those still in their minority and the socially necessary sameness that is inscribed into fully attained adulthood.