Greater child selfâ?reported perceived stress at baseline predicted greater increase in children's BMI across the six assessments whereas mother selfâ? reported perceived stress at baseline was unrelated to change in child. Sentimentalized and deployed as metonyms or allusions to imagined futures, they regularly figure in political rhetorics of all sorts, but change in children or mothers' perceived stress across the six assessment waves seldom are children themselves addressed as bona fide subjects in and of a present moment in the sociopolitical lives of nations. While analogous efforts to mobilize citizens in aid of sovereign power may be relatively rare, it is rarer still for them to be addressed to children: calls to vigilance against the threat of terrorist attacks (such as the ‘See Something, Say Something’ campaigns in Canada and the U.S.), for example, have not specifically targeted outreach to children in the same way (though, interestingly, similar and simultaneous campaigns around the more delineated scourge of school shootings have). The peculiar phenomenon of leaders making efforts to engage children directly in the context of COVID- 19.