What Children Do 2017 is a movie about a quiet, observant 10-year-old girl named Emily, who lives in a seemingly ordinary suburban neighborhood in 2017. With her parents constantly preoccupied by their devices and the digital world, Emily often feels overlooked. She spends her days playing alone in the woods behind her house, where she discovers a hidden, dilapidated treehouse filled with a collection of strange, hand-drawn maps and cryptic notes left by a group of children from decades past. These notes detail a secret game they played, involving strange "quests" and warnings about unseen threats in the neighborhood. As Emily begins to follow the clues, she slowly uncovers a sinister, generational secret buried beneath the community's placid facade. She realizes that the seemingly innocent "games" of the past were actually a desperate attempt by children to protect themselves from a dark truth that the adults have deliberately ignored or forgotten, forcing Emily to confront "what children do" when they are left to face hidden dangers alone.
