some tips on writing child characters or child muses, because i’ve noticed some things that are really really bothering me.
children, no matter how smart, wise, mature, or beyond their years they are, will still have the fallibility of children. they are still juvenile, and they still have faults and weaknesses–especially because they are so young, and still developing. if you write your character as untouchable, even if they’re, say, a child soldier, then you aren’t writing a realistic character.
children are in a serious developmental stage, as i mentioned, and it lasts until you’re actually around 21. children between about 6-13 are in a stage where they absorb everything around them and follow what they see because it’s how they learn. your child muse will and should have independent thoughts, of course, but they should also be mimicking what they see to at least some degree.
children who are reared without the love of a parent or a guardian will not develop healthily. they can learn to live on their own, of course, some children are very self reliant, but they are still children, and the lack of love and support WILL damage them. your child muse will not come out of it into adulthood totally fine. stop writing characters like this.
children are not always right. in fact, children are regularly incorrect. children make more mistakes than an adult. children say things they don’t mean. they do things that they should never do–they make serious errors. it doesn’t mean they don’t learn from them, but children generally are more openly naive than adults, even if they grow up in harsh circumstances.
just because your muse is a child does not mean they are untouchable. as i mentioned in the first point, although a child does not have the kind of self awareness or agency that an adult has, most writers will get annoyed if you push your child character at them and have them behave in some grating or violent way and then don’t expect some kind of retaliation.
children should be held to their actions, but not on the same kind of scale as adults, and not the way that you hold adults to their actions. children, generally, do not know any better. and if they do, and they deliberately behave disruptively or violently, if it isn’t from mental illness, it is probably because of something else in their life–what they learned from observing, or how they were treated. your child muse might not understand this (they probably don’t), but you, as a writer, should understand this.
