Do You Have Any Tips On How To Write Children? Love Your Parenting Fic!

do you have any tips on how to write children? love your parenting fic!

Sure! The following is for kids less than ten (usually once they're tweens the general capability of fic authors to write them improves, probably because people usually remember middle school). Keep in mind there's a huge difference between a three year old and an eight year old, though.

I think the biggest one I'd give is just remember that children characters are people. Children have their own thoughts, opinions, and ideas, and you can probably apply whatever strategy you use for writing adult characters to children. For me, I try to figure out character motives and then that guides what they do and say and how it makes them feel about things happening around them. Children will probably have more simple motivations compared to adults, although they are absolutely capable of more complex motives. For figuring out kid!motives, I try to imagine what kids' worlds consist of. For most children, school and social interactions with their teachers and other children is a huge chunk of their daily life. Their home life will also structure their motives-- do their guardians or siblings play with them? Are their guardians strict or lax? Does the kid get brought along on errands, left home alone, left with a rotating cast of babysitters, etc? How do all these factors affect how they interact with the world and what they want from it?

For an example of how I'd start with motivation for building a character in fic, Naruto's biggest motivator throughout his childhood is wanting attention because he doesn't have a home life. He acts out because he feels even negative attention is better than being ignored. So, writing his reactions to events with the idea that he genuinely just wants attention isn't very complicated. But then, what does he do once has attention? Does he react differently to positive versus negative attention? How does he react when he acts out and still fails to capture attention? How is he when he's home alone? When he fantasizes about getting his attention, how does he imagine it will go? He does his pranks for attention, so does he plan his pranks or is he mostly spontaneous, or some mix of the two? If he managed to make a friend, how would he want to play with them? When would what he wants to do in his fantasies be different from what he ends up doing, and how would he feel about it?

In considering the answers to these questions, I think another aspect of writing children that people struggle with is that children often don't have a very good sense of cause and effect, and on top of that there's huge variation in how quickly small kids pick up on action -> consequence and the nuances involved there of. Some kids, especially younger ones, will know breaking a rule leads to some negative outcome, but they might not understand the reason behind the rule and this effects their decision making. Some kids might not understand an action falls into some category there's rules about, even if they know the rules. Some kids might understand a rule and then ignore it anyway. (I told a kid I was babysitting once not to run with scissors because they could hurt themselves, and they replied, "But I do it all the time, and I've never been hurt.") I've witnessed a lot of young kids hurt another child and then get upset themselves because they literally didn't realize what they did would hurt. Kids' decisions, while they might seem illogical to adults, generally make sense to the child, and so I would encourage writers to consider why their characters are doing things and if it would make sense to that character.

The third big thing I'd keep in mind is interconnected with the two thing above, and that's "big emotions, little body." Young people often have big, confusing emotions, and they're not necessarily going to understand them and why they're happening, how to self-regulate them, or what to do about them. Like, adults have confusing emotions they don't always know what to do with, right? Imagine you're having some conflicting, confusing feelings, and also you barely understand why things are evening happening because you don't have a good handle on the concept of "consequences" outside of your mom's house rules. You also might not have even had whatever feeling before-- grief, jealousy, etc. How any given kid is going to handle their big emotions will vary because, again, children are people and they have different experiences and personalities. A kid with a good support network might be able to get an adult or maybe even another kid to help them through it. Some kids will throw tantrums or shut down or act out. Think about your child character's past experiences and what support/options might be available to them.

The final small suggestion I have is to look up age milestones. A common complaint about fictional children is them using weird, broken childspeak that's both annoying to read and unrealistic. I've worked with kids as young as three, and they can generally speak in full, coherent sentences by then.