Nobody wakes up one morning and decides a child is no longer a child. That transformation, when it happens, is slower than that — it happens mostly through language, small and repeated, until the language has done the work a single decision never could. A caregiver can be standing directly over a child and still be relating to a diagnosis instead of a person. This essay looks at how clinical shorthand, euphemism, and fatigue slowly erase a person from view, long before anythi