Writing Blog Number 2

20241218 Children Characters

Children Characters

I recently finished some beta reading for a friend (now NaNo is over). It was a simple 25k word novella with some good technicalities (though she does struggle with sentence fragments).
         However, one thing I told her (and that she spent this morning complaining about) was that her children characters were just miniature adults. So I got another teacher to come in and explain what I meant. The teacher read the most egregious examples and agreed with me – that is not how kids do things. My friend saw where I was coming from; she doesn’t have children and was judging by TV and films and external observations.
         That inspired this little blog post.
         So, when writing characters that are children there are a number of things to remember:

1) Emotions: Children are emotional creatures. Logic is not an over-riding concept. And the younger they are, the more this comes to the fore. The idea of permanence does not really sink in until they are as old as 6 (this means if you hide something, it ceases to exist in a child’s mind). But they also do not use logic, or the logic does not follow what an adult would consider logic, and this lasts until the end of adolescence (once puberty is completed), sometimes longer. Emotions do tend to over-ride their thought processes.

2) Strength and Skill: Children are not as strong or skilled as adults. While there are some children who are skilled in some things, with only one or two exceptions, they do not match an equally trained adult. This is especially true in martial arts. A child might have a black belt, but a brown belt adult, with that added strength and better perception, can often win. Plus, they might be able to wield a sword, but they do not have the strength to make the same impact as an adult. These are things that should be taken into account.

3) Perception: ’Which leads to perception. Children tend towards tunnel vision, and single sensory concentration. This means if they are focusing on the visual, the audio, smell, touch, taste is muted. It is only with puberty that this expands to enable the ability to have two or even more going on; for example, children will remember the visuals of a film, not the dialogue, while an adult will remember both.

4) Knowledge: A child will not know as much as an adult. They might have great knowledge of a single topic, but they have simply not had the time to learn about lots of subjects. And if they do have knowledge of one, this most often comes at the expense of knowledge about other things. Life experience is sold short by way too many who write children.

5) Resourcefulness: I am not saying there are no children who have lived and survived in terrible circumstances, but most children coming from a Western urbanised environment would not cope nor survive well if dumped into a situation where they have to use their wits to survive. Hell, most adults would struggle! But adults have some experience, or have seen some TV, and would have a better mental means of coping.

6) Size: Children are small. Yes, when they hit 12 or so they are getting to adult size, but they are still small, and muscles have yet to develop. Puberty is very important to changes; they are not just miniature adults before the hormones kick in.

7) Age appropriateness: Don’t have 12 years act like 5 year olds! If you have no experience with kids – ask parents or teachers and they will tell you how different the ages are.

These have come from my reading of books over the years, and are born of my experience as a teacher, and my studies in human movement and development, plus years of working with children. Every single one of these mistakes I have seen more than once.
         So, does any author write children well? Yes, in fact. JK Rowling, over the course of the Harry Potter series, shows the development and growth and learning of the children. Enid Blyton also wrote children well, especially the Famous Five. As for bad… Too many, and I won’t mention them here (except Empress Teresa by Norman Boutin, the worst book ever written).
         Anyway, I hope people write their children with a little more realism. Children are not adults and do not really think like them. Make them into kids, and the stories will benefit.