kinchin

kinchin \kin-chin\, noun:

a child.

He's naught but a kinchin, no bigger than a sparrow.

-- Joan Aiken, The Whispering Mountain

Now I come to think of it, Kinchin is English too. In Oliver Twist the boys who work for Fagin are taught to bekinchins and prig people's wipes.

-- Angela Thirkell, Caroline Alice Lejeune, Three Score and Ten

Derived from the German kindchen, kinchin is a diminutive form of kind meaning "child." Kindchen entered the lexicon in the last decade of the 1600s.