The Souls of Black Folk 5.2

The bright ideals of the past,— physical freedom, political power, the training of brains and the training of hands,— all these in turn have waxed and waned, until even the last grows dim and overcast. Are they all wrong,— all false? No, not that, but each alone was over-simple and incomplete,— the dreams of a credulous race-childhood, or the fond imaginings of the other world which does not know and does not want to know our power.
     ~     Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt) (2012-05-16). The Souls of Black Folk (p. 10).  . Kindle Edition. 

W. E. B. DuBois's text contains several accounts of children. The author-speaker was a school teacher and observed children in that capacity, and also takes two chapters to describe contrasting accounts of individual lives beginning at childhood. He also describes his own experiences and feelings at the birth and death of his first child, which places this texty squarely in object-child territory.

Chapter four describes DuBois's schoolteacher days, and the students (not only young children) who came, but only when their work wasn't needed at home. He describes many of the children individually, especially the woman-child Josie, who never did get to college, but died. He humanizes them with very lifelike, broad strokes for sympathy, and then explains how they failed. These children receive more description than most in this object-child wing, but the description serves to help the reader regret that better could not be done with their unique and valuable lives and minds. This disappointment/awakening is key to the object-child rhetoric.

The ninth chapter mentions child labor.

Chapter eleven describes the death of DuBois's firstborn child, a son. The chapter is full of pained prose and deeply mixed feelings that the child was never to grow up enough to be disillusioned, to discover the impenetrable "veil" that separates the races.

Chapter twelve describes the life of Alexander Crummell in metaphorical prose that describes three temptations of the maturing soul in a world of racial oppression: hate, despair, and doubt. The childhood test is "hate," and DuBois's solution is kindness from the enemy. This learning to hate and overcomeing it seems to be the coming-of-age disillusionment that makes this child, too, an object lesson.

John, the college student whose story DuBois talks about in the thirteenth chaper, becomes a schoolteacher but is not allowed to teach his pupils equality. His education, enlightenment, and disillusionment are constant, even though as a character, his story begins well after his childhood.