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‪In the eighteenth century, educational writing was extremely popular. Influenced by a range of educational literature that praised its various advantages, parents, tutors and children themselves took up writing. From personal diaries to travel diaries, more than 80 adolescents’ diaries, written between 1720 and 1820, were identified in the archives of French-speaking Switzerland. In addition to diaristic writing, there is an extant body of children’s letters. This material—which is also increasingly researched in a European context —now gives access to a certain form of children’s discourse that was long considered marginal for the eighteenth century. Studying these texts provides the means to write a history of childhood from the children’s point of view. This article aims to share some results for French-speaking Switzerland, relating to questions of agency in emancipation processes and the factors contributing to this empowerment—to which young people themselves refer—such as the development of social skills and the assertion of their independence. One special feature of the corpus from French-speaking Switzerland is that it includes almost 50% of women’s writing, which prompts us to consider the impact of gender on this process.‪