RSS for child pages

No, because you’re doing it wrong.

Instead of using a Page, you should have used a Category. Posts can be organized by categories. And you can actually generate RSS feeds specific to any category you want.

If you use the right thing for the right reasons, WordPress tends to do what you want it to do without a lot of hassle.
-Pages are intended for *static* content. Pages should not change very often or be added very often. They can be organized by a hierarchy (subpages and such). A “FAQ” would be a good use for pages. So would “About” and other things that would fit the mold of “static” content.
-Posts are intended for often updated content. They are organized by date/time. Generally you view many of them in some order.
-Categories are another way to organize posts into groupings. Categories can be hierarchical as well.
-Tags (soon to be added) are yet another way to organize posts, but on a less organized level. They have no hierarchy, but are easy to create on the fly.
-There are other types of pages that are automatically generated based on the information in the above. Author pages show Posts by a specific person. Date Archive pages show Posts in some sort of a date range. Category Archives show posts in a category, including child categories if you like. That sort of thing. All these can be displayed as lists of posts, RSS feeds, etc.

All these things have a specific purpose. So if, for example, you want to group posts, you use categories (or tags) to do it. Then you automatically get certain features, like the ability to view all the posts in a given category, or to create an RSS feed of those posts, or what have you. If you’re using a Page to organize things, then you’re using the Page for the wrong purpose. If you have writers writing lots of essays or articles on a continuing basis, they should be writing them as Posts, not as Pages.

No, because you’re doing it wrong.

Wrong? See, I want all the other things that go with pages: the hierarchical organization (library -> authors -> essays), the irrelevance of chronological order, etc. Once the essay’s up, it never changes. It’s static. Sounds like a page to me. In fact, the only behavior I’m looking for that Page doesn’t already deliver is the RSS feed for new essays. It’s not a very active feed, mind you, but I think some of my readers would like to know when we occasionally add new essays to the library.

Wrong? See, I want all the other things that go with pages: the hierarchical organization (library -> authors -> essays), the irrelevance of chronological order, etc.

Yes, wrong. See, Posts get all those other things automatically. Hierarchy is achieved through categories.

Also, chronological order is not irrelevant if you want to make a feed out of them, because a feed has an implied order and absolutely depends on date and time of the entries.

Once the essay’s up, it never changes. It’s static. Sounds like a page to me.

You missed the part where I said “Pages should not change very often or be added very often.” The word “static” is used here in terms of the site as a whole, not only in terms of the content of the page.

If you’re adding content on a regular (or irregular) basis, that content should be posts. Posts rarely change after they are made too, that doesn’t make them static. They’re dynamic in terms of the site because there are new ones every so often.

In fact, the only behavior I’m looking for that Page doesn’t already deliver is the RSS feed for new essays.

Pages cannot be put into a feed specifically because Pages have no inherent ordering. They don’t have date and times. Feeds *require* dates and times to function correctly. That’s how new content is differentiated from old content, in a feed. By dates and times.

You could hack some way to do it, no doubt, but whatever you do is just that: a hack. The correct way is to make these Pages you have into Posts. Why? Because you are creating new content on a semi-regular basis. That is exactly what a Post is made to do.

It’s not a very active feed, mind you, but I think some of my readers would like to know when we occasionally add new essays to the library.

The activity of the feed is irrelevant. The only things I can suggest at this point are either:
a) Move all these Pages to Posts, create the hierarchy using Category and Author calls instead, or
b) Make a Post whenever you add a new library Page to tell your readers.

Essentially, you’re saying that you want to make feeds for a Page, which inherently makes no sense. It’s the wrong question, in other words. That’s not what Pages are nor how they work.

If, instead, you had said something like “I want to make a library of essays and articles which I add to semi-regularly. I will organize it hierarchically and by authors and such, and I want feeds to tell people when I add new ones.” then I would tell you to:
1. Make all your articles as Posts.
2. Assign these posts proper categories in the hierarchy.
3. Make these posts written by their authors.
4. Use category feeds to notify users of new articles.
5. If you want to make some kind of Page to list them, use custom Category Templates and Author Templates to display the things the way you want to display them instead.
6. If you don’t want these to appear with your other, normal posts, use plugins like “Category Visibility” to hide them from places like the front page and so forth.

That’s what I’d tell you to do.

I was looking for the same thing and found this plugin: Feed Control – add Pages to your feeds or remove posts from them

Otto, you probably are absolutely correct from your perspective, but you and some folks at WordPress should accept that each of our minds operate a little bit differently. What you see as a Category to others like myself is gibberish. To us, Pages make perfect sense and for us to function we need to deal with WordPress in a manner that makes perfect sense to us. Even though you may beieve that our perspective is alien to your way of thinking. To me much of the success of the most popular software in use is the variety of ways one can accomplish the exact same thing and this accomodates the software to a wider community of users. Why can’t WordPress be that way too?

Don’t know if you ever figured it out, but here’s one way to create a feed from pages: https://www.dharmarketing.com/adding-wp-pages-to-your-feed-continued-27