Government ideologies seek to produce ideal childhoods within their political and ideological frameworks. Using the analysis of a children's magazine in kindergartens in socialist Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 1980s, this paper argues that children's literature produces political and ideologically charged childhood subjectivities. Tensions between the private and public spheres of the production of childhoods, and the complex, non-linear power relations are explored through a philosophical lens that incorporates the thinking of Vaclav Havel. Politics and ideology were a major directional focus in storylines and in tales and texts in socialist children's literature. It is suggested that the Czechoslovak case can serve as a springboard to understand how childhoods in different ideologies are produced through early childhood children's literature. (Contains 9 notes.)