The use by children and the young of alcohol, tobacco, films and pulp novels in the years before the outbreak of the First World War was a subject of extensive concern. The debate about tobacco, film and the pulp fiction took on the character of moral panics, while the alcohol issue remained a moral crusade which functioned as a kind of underlying sounding‐board for the three panics. Starting with the issue of children's tobacco smoking I give an account of the content and protagonists of the panics, their rhetoric and their views of children and the young. I argue that the panics not only helped to put into words an existing concern, especially about the children of the city, but that they also–as an extension of the new child psychology insights of the period–helped to draw up the contours of a new social group, the 14‐16‐year‐olds, who were to become far more visible in the course of the twentieth century. In addition the panics gave the teaching profession the opportunity to appear as experts on both ...