Childhood Reimagined
Children’s Voices in the Digital Age
What do children want adults to know about growing up online? This year, we asked them. Now it’s your turn to listen.
🗓️ Saturday, Nov 14, 2026 🕛 10am – 3pm EST
📍North York Central Library, Room 101 🏷️Free
Every child has the right to be heard
Childhood Reimagined: Children’s Voices in the Digital Age invites you to see childhood today through children’s own eyes. Friendships, learning, play and worries increasingly unfold on screens, yet children are rarely asked what this feels like.
Over the past year, Kids Rights Canada gathered children’s drawings, words and opinions through workshops and communities across the Greater Toronto Area.
This exhibition brings them together in three parts: Growing Up Online, Intergenerational Dialogue and Woven Voices. Launched for National Child Day, it will travel to communities over the coming year. Look closely, listen carefully, and join the conversation.
Three ways to listen
Growing Up Online
Listen
Balloons drift overhead, each one carrying a child’s drawing or message about life online. Some will make you laugh. Some might stop you in your tracks.
Intergenerational Dialogue
Respond
Children rarely get the first word. Here, they do. One side of this installation holds paintings by child artist Cecelia Johnston, finishing the sentence “What I want to tell adults…” Step around to the other side, and the conversation turns to you. What would you tell a child growing up today?
Woven Voices
Connect
How does it really feel to be a kid online? Children answer with a strand of yarn, a different colour for each feeling: happy, anxious, curious, lonely and more. Thread by thread, a picture emerges that no single answer could show. Watch it grow through the day, and see which colours take over.
Why children’s voices matter
As the world seems to be coming apart at the seams the voices of our children must be heard. Those voices simple and wise, stop us in our tracks and centre us when it appears the centre will not hold.
Irwin Elman
President, Defence for Children International – Canada
Making meaningful decisions about digital worlds means listening, hearing and respecting what children and young people say about their online lives. Work with, not only for, them to balance safety with children’s rights.
Virginia Caputo
Director, Landon Pearson Center
Dear Nova, today you’re two and cute-as-a-button and I love singing you lullabies when mommy calls, but a goodnight hug is soooo much better.
Christian Whalen
Nova’s Pépère (grandfather) & Founder, Canadian Observatory on the Rights of the Child
Plan your visit
When
Saturday, November 14, 2026
10am – 3pm EST
Where
North York Central Library, Room 101
5120 Yonge Street, Toronto
Getting there
Connected to North York Centre station (Line 1).
Cost
Free. Drop-ins welcome.
Who it’s for
Children, families, educators, youth workers and anyone who makes decisions that affect kids
Bringing a class or group? Email us at info@kidsrightscanada.org to book a time.
Hello kids, this is for you!
This art exhibition is made by kids, about being a kid in the digital age. You have the right to share your ideas, and grown-ups should listen. Bring a grown-up and come say hi.
Look at fellow children’s drawings
Tell grown-ups what you really think
Participate in a collaborative weaving activity
Help children be heard
With thanks to our partners
Event Sponsors
