This study contends that Chaucer's work contributes to what we know about children in the Middle Ages and furthers the discourse on childhood launched by Philippe Ariès so many years ago. Chaucer's range of portrayals enables many of his children to speak of their own experiences if ever so briefly, or, when silent, to act as meaningful signifiers. By foregrounding the child and children and by recognizing the poet's proclivity toward inventive excursions into the play worlds of the child, children become audible individuals in their own right. Ages of Man theories and encyclopedic descriptions of the stages of life provide a backdrop against which Chaucer's theory of age, one commensurate with questions of authority current at the time, may be more fully appreciated.