8 Embarrassing Mistakes When Writing Child Characters

so I recently made two viral videos about how to write men and how to write women and some of the comments said that I should make a video on how to write children well here it is now just to be clear we're not talking about how to write kids for children's literature for picture books or for mg or ya or something like that no we're talking about how to write kids in novels for adults I'll go over eight of the embarrassing mistakes that you don't want to fall prey to when writing kids in your stories

but then I'll also suggest some more practical ways you can make sure your kids are well- written and believable characters the first mistake that I see semi-frequently is the accidentally precocious child now I say accidentally because there's nothing wrong with a precocious child right I mean that's a that's a great character to have but the trouble is is if you write it in a way where it seems like you don't realize that they're acting far older than their age so what this looks like is If the child is acting really precocious in your story and

yet it sort of goes unmentioned in the story line and there's no repercussions or any sort of reason for it so if a 5-year-old is acting like a 15 or 20-year-old and no characters in the novel react to that it seems really really unrealistic so how do you write a precocious child well well for starters I think that the adults in that child's life should be talking about it or pointing it out like make it obvious that this is something different than the norm the other trick that's really important is to make sure that this

precocious child is socially exiled because they are precocious a kid like this isn't going to fit in with other kids their age and a great example of this would be in A Wrinkle In Time by meline lingle in that book mag is a very gifted girl but she's having lots of social troubles at school and that's because she simply just doesn't fit in to me that strikes me as a very realistic portrait of what a precocious child would be like a second common mistake when writing children is the supernaturally well-behaved child I have seen movies

where parents will ask a child to go to bed and they'll like protest for like half a second and then suddenly they'll just like trundle off to bed all obedient like and I'm like hold on here like that's the most unbelievable thing I've ever seen in my life it would be more believable if like aliens had come in and kidnapped the child and took them up to bed and I want to ask the author like have you been around children have you tried to put a child to bed it would be easier to negotiate with

a Taliban so what's the upshot here don't make your child character too perfect you have probably heard of Mary Suz and Gary stews which are female main characters and male characters which are too perfect and I would like to suggest the Cherub stew and cherub sus as being too perfect of children I claim that phrase I came up with it so make sure to site me if you say that elsewhere now to be clear there are some authors who fail on the opposite side of the spectrum where every single child and everything they write is

constantly Miss behaving which I also find incredibly unrealistic they're doing this because it's a really easy cheap way to get conflict into the narrative and to make the adult parent viewers or readers like sympathize but I think it's not true to how kids normally act like it's usually a mixture of good behavior and bad behavior let's move on to the third mistake when writing children the tiny adult syndrome this is when child characters are written with the sophistication and reasoning of an adult now if you want to play this off for Laughs that can actually

work I think of something like a young Sheldon there is a young kid who acts far too old for his age but it works because it's really funny like it's his shtick but if you're not going for laughs and you depict your child character thinking like an adult it's not going to ring true to your audience so here are three quick ways you can make your kid be more kid-like one look for places where the kid won't be exactly logical like a kid is driving in a car they see the moon and say oh the

Moon is following us it wants to be our friend that type of kid logic is not something that an adult would ever say but it's the essence of what being a kid feels like I also think your child character should have some wild or imaginative thoughts when my kid was younger he once asked why we couldn't put Windows on the floor of our house why because he wanted to watch the ants down there would an adult think that or say that absolutely not it has to come from from the brain of a child so you

give them some ideas like that and suddenly your readers are like that is obviously a kid right there and a third example would be deeply inappropriate questions for instance an adult has a conversation with a member of the opposite sex on the street and the little kid's like are you going to marry her so look for those type of opportunities where you remind the reader like hey this is just a kid like what they're saying is not the type of thing an adult would say and quick note about characterization in general whether it's for kids

or for adults if you need a little help with making your characters a little bit more real check out my course the triangle method of character creation in my book Fox Academy or check out uh my novel course which will help you with creating real and authentic characters that spring off the page I'll put a link to that in the description below if you're not subscribed already you are missing out the fourth mistake that some authors make when writing kids is rigid archetypes now take note that I didn't say all archetypes there's nothing wrong with

an archetype right you can use them to create a character and that's that's perfectly fine the trouble is when they're rigid and what I mean by that is that you don't change that character or evolve that character so they go a little bit beyond the archetype and seem like they're their own unique person so let's look at five examples and I'll show you for each one what the archetype is and then how to go a little bit beyond it the first one is the spoiled child and the best way to learn how to write this

is to look at Willie Wonka by R doll this is a master class in how to have a bunch of spoiled children and yet every single one is uniquely individualistic in how they are spoiled so you have a character like violet who is very Brash and confrontational and also extremely competitive and then you have a character like veruka salt who is very entitled she is very manipulative and she uses Tantrums strategically and then you have good old Augustus Gloop who's just dim and gluttonous so if you want to write a spoiler child perfectly fine that's

great just think about what traits you're going to give them that's going to separate them out from other spoiled children the second archetype we could look out would be the innocent and for an example of this we're going to look at Cormac McCarthy's the road but this child doesn't remain just a prototypical innocent he has phrases like carry the fire and he has an immense uh sense of generosity and kindness toward others even though he's living in this apocalyptic Wasteland another archetype would be the genius and I think of 7-year-old Mary in the movie gifted

and one thing that helps to set her apart is it's not a normal father daughter relationships it's actually her uncle who is taking care of her and I find that's a nice little twist that helps the movie not seem so predictable and and routine a fourth archetype would be the chosen one and for this let's look at the movie The Girl With all the gifts this girl is different because she is immune from the virus that causes the zombie apocalypse but the author doesn't stop there that would be a mistake she would be a stereotypical

character instead she has this girl have a great love for Learning and has her love Greek myths especially Pandora what that does is it just helps her make her a little bit more unique as a character and the fifth kid archetype would just be comedic relief kids are funny they're often put in stories just as a way to get laughs from the reader and for an example of this I think of Little Miss Sunshine where we have a little girl who's traveling to a beauty pageant but what sets her a part and why she breaks

out of this stereotypical archetype is that she doesn't exactly look like a prototypical beauty pageant girl like she doesn't fit into that Norm and she certainly does not act like one on stage either anyway it is fine to use broad archetypes for your child characters just do some work to make them individualistic and to make them seem different than other characters a fifth mistake I see sometimes when writing child characters is oversimplifying their emotional lives so I know that kids often can articulate their feelings with adult sophistication but that doesn't mean they're not feeling a

lot of complex things sometimes even contradictory emotions they can be feeling both anger and fear at the same time they can be feeling both scared and excited at the same time so my advice is don't reduce the children in your book to a single emotional state the way I see this most often is with children uh characters who are just angry all the time they're just throwing Tantrums all the time that to me doesn't seem realistic and my last point about child's emotional states is that kids flip from one emotional state to another like a

thousand times faster than adults do so you can have a kid who's super super sad and then they're offered ice cream and it's like 1,000% happy and vice versa right their emotional states change really really quickly if you use that in your book it'll feel authentic to the reader and also might provide a bit of a laugh the sixth mistake is the old Soul complex some child characters are simply too knowledgeable one of the great things about kids is that they're often wonderfully naive a really good example of how to do this would be in

the novel room by Emma Donahue in this novel we have a child narrator named Jack and he is imprisoned inside a very small room with his mother and they're imprisoned by a guy called Old Nick who's kept them there for the last seven years when he's done exactly what you would expect to the woman and the child is the result now having a child narrator is literally the only way that this book could work because it's dark enough as is but when you see it through the lens of Jack you see it through this very

naive pretty like happy kid who doesn't know there's an outside world like he's happy to be with his mom and to live his life in this small room it breaks your heart as a reader but his naive is what saves the novel just look for places in your book where your child character can be a little naive either as a way to make your book a little more funny or as a way to soften what could be a really dark situation now it is time for the seventh mistake diction level screw-ups so there's two mistakes

you can make here right uh one would be to have the words that your child character says be far too sophisticated for their age it just doesn't sound like a kid would talk that way and then the second one is just to make them a little bit too babyish so my advice here is if you know any real children of that age make sure to hang out with them for a while before you write that section and if you don't have access to a child of that age make sure you look up some videos where

you can see how a kid that age would actually talk and even if you are a parent and had children at one point of the age of the character that you're writing about it doesn't matter I recently listened to audio of my kid when they were four or five they're 12 now and the way he sounded put this on on top of that I put that on top of there I mean I forgot his stutter was that bad I forgot like how high his voice is I had really forgotten so much as a parent so

it's really important to remind yourself oh like that's how a 5-year-old talks I totally forgot that now if you want a child character to speak in a way that indicates their far older than what they actually are that's perfectly fine my one piece of advice would be to make it select itively uneven like most of the time they talk in this very sophisticated way but sometimes something's going to squeak out that reveals like oh like they're still just very much a kid and lastly the final mistake that we're going to look at when writing kids

is generational assumptions if you are a gen xer or a baby boomer or something and trying to write a kid which I guess would be generation Alpha right then there is going to be some different belief systems going on if you interview a bunch of 8-year-old olds like 80% of them are going to list influencers being one of their top three jobs that might surprise older folks quite a bit also remember that kids have completely different celebrities than you do my kids worshiped dude perfect for years and years before they ever knew the names Tom

Cruz or Brad Pit a third thing to think about is just different generational expectations to a six or seven-year-old it may be perfectly natural for them to have a phone because they're friend have phones while to someone who's slightly older be like listen kid you want to wait on that you want you don't want to be addicted to social media at your age also different Generations have vastly different expectations for stuff like online privacy some might say like oh I don't want any of my information out there and other people just share everything gleefully yay

internet come to me and the fourth generational thing that you might want to focus on is just the type of slaying that younger kids might be using like younger kids would say stuff like touch grass or oh that's mid or that really increases my aura or even say something about Riz you know you just have to know and really incorporate whatever slang or lingo that the kids are using these days how do you do fellow kids what so the final goal is to come up with a child character that doesn't have the diction and societal

beliefs and expectations of say a Gen X author