The two decades after the Second World War witnessed the blossoming of humanitarian work focused on the child, as diplomats, educational psychologists, and economists sought to safeguard the potential of the child generation to promote prosperity and prevent another devastating war. Almost no attention has been paid to how Iraqis conceived of this postwar generational challenge, despite the extensive dislocations and wartime privations its citizens suffered after the British occupation in 1941. Iraqi children in these years were the beneficiaries of a parent generation that had witnessed considerable national development in their own childhood. As they looked forward to how development should best take advantage of rising oil revenues and an increasingly well-educated workforce, Iraqis increasingly came to invoke childhood as a focal point of reminiscence and sociological analysis with which to direct future development. Participants in the discourse on childhood often imagined archetypes of the spaces through which children passed as they developed into adults, in particular the kittab or maktab school, which threatened to harm the child if not managed carefully, and the museum, which was held forth as an embodiment of cultural authenticity that prepared the child to contribute to national progress in their adulthood. These spaces stood in contrast to the street, which served as the repository of failed attempts to bring children into an economically productive and moral future. The many contributors to the discourse on childhood were active as lawyers, journalists, and teachers in Iraq, including Sabiha al-Shaykh Dawud, Anwar al-Sha’ul, ‘Ali al-Wardi, and Matta Akrawi, among others. They understood their own childhood reminiscences as the point of departure for further discussion, but came to rely on the archetypal spaces of childhood development in a bid to control the future of the nation as the growing city of Baghdad, in particular, threatened to overwhelm childhood with a host of negative experiences. In order to understand this discursive representation of childhood in relation to the nation, my paper seeks to step back from the vocabulary of national curricula and idealist educators with which previous scholars have written on Iraqi children, and highlight the spatial components of the discourse so as to ground it in the daily experiences of a rapidly urbanizing population. My sources are pedagogical writings in Arabic, memoirs in Arabic, and the Iraqi periodical press.