The history of western societies reveals a recurring theme of standing up for the child's perspective in order to liberate the child from external authority. On the one hand this is related to the rise of enlightened theories of education since the seventeenth century. On the other hand this is related to radical changes in life circumstances of young children and their mothers and fathers in industrialized urban countries. Pleas to free children were, and are, always connected to endeavours to rethink authority and the balance between autonomy and connectedness. In this paper I put the recent interest in the child's voice into an historical perspective. Firstly I briefly discuss the liberation of the child at an ideological level; the level of the enlightened pedagogues and developmental psychologists. Secondly, I discuss changes in society that created the necessary conditions to put the enlightened ideas into practice in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Finally I discuss why listening to the child's voice is urgently needed in the beginning of the twenty-first century.