The child-depot policy separates Momo’s young friends by converting adult concern into a system of control. Presented as protection, public safety, and preparation for the future, the policy removes children from the streets and parks, divides their friendships by district, and replaces free play with supervised activities. Its deepest consequence is not simply that Momo returns to an empty Amphitheater: the children have been made to forget how to play, take pleasure in small things, and dream.

The children’s community before the depots

Momo’s presence had helped make the Amphitheater a place where children could invent games together. She did not need to supply elaborate ideas; joining in was enough to set their imaginations moving. They came up with new games day after day, each improving on the last. In one instance, a boy proposed turning the Amphitheater into a ship and assigning the children roles on a scientific expedition. The first attempt faltered in squabbling, but after Momo arrived the imagined voyage took shape: the children sailed the Argo toward perilous seas and a roaming waterspout, giving their play a whole world of hazards and adventure.

That ability to make a world from shared invention stood in contrast to the expensive, highly detailed toys that began appearing among the children. Remote-controlled tanks, rockets on strings, and model robots could move, but offered little beyond their programmed actions. Their owners watched, fascinated but bored; the old games, by contrast, could turn a few boxes, a torn tablecloth, or handfuls of pebbles into something much larger. The later policy would institutionalize the same narrowing of possibility: children could still be assigned games, but no longer freely devise them.

The children had also shown that they could gather around a common purpose. At one meeting in the Amphitheater, some fifty or sixty children came from across the city, from varied backgrounds and ages. After Momo recounted what she knew about the time-thieves, Guido Guide asked who had the courage to join a campaign against the Men in Gray. This earlier collective response helps frame the depot system: the children were not only playmates gathered around Momo, but a community capable of hearing about a threat and considering action together.

Adult arguments and the policy

After Momo disappeared, her friends continued to meet at the Amphitheater whenever they could. They made castles, palaces, and galleons from old crates and boxes, and went on telling stories. They behaved as though Momo were still among them; their certainty that she would return was shared without needing to be discussed. The Men in Gray could not break this attachment by directly taking the children under their control, so they looked for an indirect route and enlisted adults who were willing to help.

The public case for intervention gathered several complaints into one argument. Some parents said more children were being left alone because adults no longer had time to care for them, and claimed that the authorities must take responsibility. Others objected that children were idle, obstructed traffic, and contributed to costly road accidents. Still others warned that unsupervised children would become unruly, morally depraved, or criminal. A further appeal recast childhood as a resource to be managed: a future dependent on computers and nuclear energy, it was argued, would require experts and technicians, while children were wasting precious years on childish play.

The Men in Gray supported the policy, and their growing influence helped persuade the authorities to act promptly. The shift is consequential: what had been a matter of adult time and competing claims about children’s welfare became a citywide arrangement backed by regulation. The language of care and usefulness made control appear necessary, while the children’s own wishes and relationships scarcely entered the decision.

Establishment and daily operation

Large buildings called child depots soon appeared in every neighborhood. Children whose parents were too busy to look after them had to be deposited there and could be collected when convenient. They were forbidden to play in streets, parks, or other public places. Any child caught doing so was taken immediately to the nearest depot, and the parents faced a heavy fine. The system therefore reached beyond the depot walls: the threat of removal and financial penalty discouraged children from gathering elsewhere and made families participants in enforcing the restrictions.

None of Momo’s friends escaped. The authorities sorted them according to the districts they came from and sent them to different depots, breaking up the group that had met at the Amphitheater. Inside, supervisors chose the games, which had to serve a useful educational purpose. The children learned these prescribed activities, but lost other capacities in the process: they forgot how to be happy, how to enjoy small things, and how to dream. The distinction is not between play and no play, but between play made by children and an activity selected for them to produce an approved benefit.

The consequences appeared in their demeanor as well as their routines. Weeks passed, and the children began to resemble time-savers in miniature: sullen, bored, and resentful, they did what they were told. When left to themselves, they no longer knew what to do. They could still make noise, but it had become angry and ill-tempered rather than the exuberant clamor of their former games. The policy thus produced outward compliance without restoring the happiness and inventiveness that its advocates’ language of education and preparation seemed to promise.

The empty Amphitheater and Momo’s return

The Men in Gray did not need to approach the children directly. Their network of restrictions was so tightly woven that even the brightest and most ingenious children could not escape it. The Amphitheater, once filled by games and stories, stood silent and deserted. When Momo eventually sat on its stone steps and waited all day for her friends, no one came. The emptiness marks the policy’s practical success: it had severed the everyday gatherings that kept her friends connected to her and to one another.

Later, while wandering through the city, Momo encountered Paolo, Franco, and Maria, who had once carried her little sister Rosa. She could hardly recognize them. They wore gray uniforms and had stiff, lifeless expressions; even when Momo greeted them delightedly and asked them to return to the Amphitheater to play, they barely smiled and refused. Their changed appearance makes the effects of institutional separation visible in three familiar children, rather than leaving them as an abstract population hidden inside depots.

Franco explained that they were going to a play class, where they were taught how to play. The day’s activity was data retrieval: the children pretended to be punch cards carrying information. Calling it a game did not restore the self-directed invention that had once transformed the Amphitheater into a ship or the old boxes into galleons. The phrase play class captures the policy’s reversal particularly clearly: play, formerly something children made together, had become a lesson and a scheduled exercise.

Significance

The policy’s force lies in joining regulation of space to regulation of imagination. Children are prohibited from meeting freely in public, separated according to where they live, and permitted to play only under adult supervision and for an approved purpose. Each restriction reinforces the next: dispersal breaks up the group, prescribed games constrain invention, and the resulting boredom makes independent activity harder even when supervision is absent.

The episode also exposes the distance between the policy’s stated rationale and its human cost. Adults invoke neglect, road safety, morality, and the technical demands of the future; the result is not a flourishing community of prepared children, but a generation that has forgotten how to occupy itself joyfully. By using adults and authorities rather than confronting the children openly, the Men in Gray turn the language of protection and efficiency into a means of isolating Momo. The abandoned Amphitheater and the uniformed children show what that strategy has taken away: not only Momo’s companions, but the shared, imaginative life through which they had remained her friends.