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This chapter makes an exploratory and discursive expedition into oddly unmapped territory. It is concerned with children, childhood, the body and social life, and with how emotions mediate between these. The author does not seek to rehearse the literature on the body and the emotions, instead of making a critical analysis of this new field, she starts from another new discipline, the sociology of childhood. She explores ways of incorporating children and childhood into sociological discourse on the importance of the emotions in social life. Essentially she starts, as some feminist research has, from the proposition that people experience the body as a complex of understandings. Its physical character is continually under inspection and control in the physical and social environments wherein people move. Its social character and value are under construction in interactions with others, and especially with those who have some superiority to the individual person or group. The people's estimation of their own bodily and social value is under constant revision in response to these experiences in a range of social environments and with a range of people. The central proposition explored in this chapter, in relation to children, is that emotions mediate between the social order and the body. They construct how we feel about our bodies. Bodily experience is conditioned, or modified, by the social environment--which itself may be more or less modifiable in response to how we feel about our embodied experience. Emotions then provide a link bridging mind and body, individual, society and the body politic. Among the deliberations of scholars about how we may think about the body and its relationships to the social order, these ideas seem to fit most closely with what we know of children's experiences (though these have been little researched), and they provide a framework within which to discuss these experiences further.