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Writing for Children and Young Adults — Why it Matters

“Why are you writing for children and young adults?”

This is a question I’ve had to answer frequently in my career. It got me thinking that I should write down my answer and see if anyone agrees with me!

writing for children, writing for kids, writing for young adults, why i write
Writing for children and young adults is a way to hand them a road map that just might help them navigate adolescence.

Writing for Children — a Way to Keep Learning and Growing

As most adults grow older, it seems that their world narrows. Doors and windows, possibilities and opportunities, that used to exist when they were kids seem to close or disappear. People make up their minds, stop learning, evolve more slowly or not at all. On the other hand, growing up is all about change. Ideas aren’t set in stone, minds change every day, people explore the world before forming their opinion of it.

Young adulthood is such an engaged and dynamic time in someone’s life. Writing for children and young adults is a way to hand them a road map; a way to help them through the volatility. I also know that if I keep my imagination there, my world will never narrow. I’ll never stop learning and growing, and that’s exactly the kind of life I want to live.

Writing for Children — My Story

My young adulthood is a prime example of this. I immigrated to California from Moscow when I was seven, essentially leaving one childhood behind. To this day, I feel like the ten years afterward, from age seven to seventeen, were some of my most significant. Not only did I have to come into my own as a young adult, but I also forged an identity, juggling between my Russian heritage and my future as an American. Twice the growth, twice the change.

It was such a rich, painful, life-altering time and that’s why writing for children and young adults is important to me… to capture and share those moments. To keep their memory alive in my life because that’s one of the only links I have to my first childhood and the first girl I was, the one that’s still intact somewhere, flying on a rickety Aeroflot plane over Siberia, on her way to a new life.

Are you writing for children or young adults? Hire me as your children’s book editor and I’ll help you polish your project so it’s the best it can be.

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Copyright © Mary Kole at Kidlit.com