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@kate Okay, thanks for letting me know!

I think that especially at that young age, we’re prone to view children as annoying, when (like Kate said) they just see the world in a different way, and often it’s not their fault they’re not thinking in line with all of the older people. So we need to avoid putting our character down as unimportant or their thoughts as trivial.

I think child characters I liked was Mary (and eventually Colin) in The Secret Garden, because even though they were selfish and stuck-up at first, they opened with the natural curiosity of children to the outdoors and thrived in nature. Even though we probably shouldn’t imitate the author and say “She was selfish”, I think something about that curiosity was simply beautiful.

Which leads me to the thought: we should try to write our child character in a way that challenges us older people. That might be a given already, but thinking about The Secret Garden made me realize how appealing that story was, and how it encouraged me and the adult characters in the book to look at life in a fresher way.