Ender's Game prominently features children, three of whom decide the fate of Earth during their teens. Ender Wiggin leads the destruction of an entire race of enemy aliens, saving humanity from inter-species war. His brother and sister amuse themselves by nearly causing a cataclysmic civil war on earth. Before reaching adulthood, these three children make themselves the most influential human beings alive. While very gifted and ambitious, they are still emotionally immature, and most of their decisions bare the marks of that immaturity.
Ender eliminates the race of buggers without any knowledge of doing so. The adults disguise the war campaign as a game. Ender thinks he is training for a future conflict, but in reality he is destroying countless human and bugger lives without even being made aware of his actions. Likewise Peter and Val commit ideological warfare in the media without realizing the consequences (at least, Valentine doesn't immediately realize them). By the end of the novel, Val abandons her political aspirations as Demosthenes, not wanting help her brother by unfairly influencing the uneducated masses. Ender also steps back from his position as "Earth's Savior" to realize he has committed a horrible crime of war, that the games he was playing have real-life consequences.
On the colony, Ender comes into contact with the dead alien race, and he comes into the knowledge that his war was against a peaceful people with no intention to continue attacking the humans. His realization comes in a valley shaped from the image of the game he played in battle-school. What seemed to the childish, invading humans to be a game is revealed to Ender to actually have been a massacre.
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I think that Chicodelabarba's comment about the three siblings being emotionally immature is a very prominent piece of Card's novel. The reader can't help but be shocked and disturbed by what Ender undergoes as the world's "savior." Despite his underdeveloped emotional maturity, he is forced to be an adult, even under the guise of playing games. As Chicodelabarba says, all of the Wiggin children are extremely gifted and ambitious, however this doesn't mean that they have the maturity to deal with the events that play out. They should be allowed to be children, but that certainly is not what happens with Ender. Mazer even tells him that, "Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf" (277). This is not the sort of mantra that is normally acceptable to push on a child, even one so strong as Ender.
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