children, little ones: the young, dependent members of a household or nation, taken as a group rather than as one child
At its heart this word names the little ones of a family or a nation: the young children, always thought of as a group rather than as a single child. It is the word in the recurring roll call of a people, the men, the women, and the children, and it marks the youngest and most vulnerable among them.
It carries two closely related shades. Sometimes it points straight at the small children themselves, the ones who cannot yet tell right from wrong, the ones killed or spared in the grim accounts of ancient warfare. Other times it names the whole band of dependents, everyone who cannot fend for themselves and so must be looked after: the ones loaded into wagons for a long journey, left behind in fortified towns while the fighting men march out, and handed food in a famine. In these settings the little ones is a kind of shorthand for all who must be carried, sheltered, and fed.
The word is not as narrow as the English little ones can sound. It is not limited to infants, and it is not limited to boys: in one passage the little ones spared in war are the young unmarried women. So the term really marks a social role, the dependent young of a group, more than a fixed age or sex.