François Truffaut's gift for directing children had already been proven by The Four Hundred Blows (1959) and The Wild Child (1970), which neither sentimentalized nor idealized childhood. Small Change examines the lives of several school children in a small provincial town and their relationships to adults and classmates. In the autobiographical The Four Hundred Blows, a young Truffaut portrayed children as confined by the restrictions and insensitivities of the world around them; here, the older Truffaut offers a view of children from the adult perspective: unaware of the care, love, and devotion their parents and teachers bestow.