How to Write Like a Little Kid

Question

I'm writing a story with 3 POV's. One of which is a 6 year old girl. The problem is simply this: I'm neither a girl nor in first grade. In fact, I'm quite a bit older. The first problem I've more-or-less gotten, but it's the second one I'm having issues with. I've looked at the question How can I make dialog sound like that of a six year old?, and it helped, but the storytelling aspects aren't there, which is more of what I was hoping for.

I definitely understand what Wetcircuit said, that this is asking what to write. I don't want an exact 'she'll sound like this,' more of a generalization to pointing me in the right direction. I tend to write with a style of long sentences and words, and it doesn't end up fitting at all.

Essentially: How is a little kid's thinking different from older kids and adults, and how can I transfer that methodology into my writing?

Answer 1

Character first

They are still a character, and more importantly a protagonist who will compare directly in the same work to 2 other (adult) protagonists. They will each need to hold their own in the reader's mind, earning their screen time.

For that reason I would not begin with her 'handicaps' as a little girl, but create a 'full' character with all the usual trimmings (wants and needs, something holding them back, an inciting incident).

Assuming all 3 interact (the other 2 are her parents maybe) it might help to create a character chart how each protagonist effects the other 2 when they are present. You may discover some new dynamics by comparing the ensemble that would not be an obvious trait for a child.

Girls vs boys (around age 6)

Again, character first because anything in this section is a huge generalization.

Boys	Girls
compete with each other	synchronize with each other
constant physical activity	constant social commentary
compulsive: "I did it because"	obsessive: "I know it because"
single winner	group consensus
elaborate toy car smash-ups	elaborate doll psycho-drama
Crying because fell out of tree	crying because insulted
Fights	Drama
Look what I can do (skill)	Look at me (talent)
winning the trophy	getting into the best group

At age 6, the genders have more in common than different, but they are already heavily gendered in society.

Both roleplay with human avatars, but girls have 'dolls' and boys have 'action figures' – their construction strongly informs how a child is intended to interact (change their clothes or launch from an ejector seat). Girls get EasyBake™ ovens and boys get chemistry sets: similar tasks but different implied social roles. Both genders will experiment outside the box, and both are as likely to pretend to invent radio-active poisons that are fed to their stuffed animals in a macabre murder fantasy.

The gender-isms in their environment are really just set-dressing; it's valid to write her as a boy if that is easier and then surround her with a mix of appropriate (and inappropriate) toys.

Moving past gender, there will be a lot of cultural norms thrown at them, but they won't have bought into it. Every child will have 'wrong' toys, 'wrong' clothes, and a few 'wrong' tastes that are inconsequential to their personality, but basically a thing they are still young enough to get away with.

Child vs adult

At roughly 8-12, kids begin radical social development where they start to become 'aware' and can compare what they personally have to what others have – by 13 this is cemented and their social peers are far more important than family.

But rewind to age 6, they are on the high-functioning end of blissful ignorance.

Kids have weirdly lucid adult moments, but like AI there are huge gaps in logic that make you question if they understand anything or are just faking it. In real life their world is smaller, but to them it's still big and they understand it reasonably well. The Dunning-Kruger effect is strong. They don't assume there is any adult-stuff they don't yet understand, instead they will just patch-over the gaps with things they do know, and dismiss what they don't find interesting.

In adults we talk about fight or flight as a pro-active defense mechanism, but in kids it's more common to freeze – likely an evolutionary behavior that works to keep them alive. When in danger, kids will hide. It's probably the most common game they play. Kids will have a different mental map of their environment to an adult. You will have the chance to re-invent your location through this protagonist. At 6 they are starting to outgrow this, but still small enough to fit in their best places. If a 6-year-old needed to hide, they would be uniquely expert at not being found.

Try to find other ways to empower this protagonist by giving her different patterns to the adults. Give her an interior life, and her own agency and consequences that fit the genre.

"Give me a child of 7 and I will show you the man." ― Aristotle

Find the British documentary called 7 Up. It interviews 7-year-olds (in 1964) asking them basic questions about their lives and opinions. (The documentary continued to interview them every 7 years as they grew up.)

There is a section where they're asked about having a love interest. 2 boys recount a game of chasing and kissing (one enjoys when the girls scream, the other seems to prefer when the girls chase back), a group of girls are able to state which of them is the most attractive, and also which boys like which girls (apparently having already paired everyone off), a third boy dryly brags about his girlfriend in Africa and another 2 in Switzerland, a forth is worried his future wife might feed him vegetables, another boy looks shocked and refuses to answer 'those types of questions' – it is hilarious! And they are all different.

Again the take-away is that they are characters first, but at a special age where they are maybe the purest version of themselves. They are guileless little adults with all the sophisticated emotions and fallibility, already strong opinion of how things 'are' (or 'ought to be'), but with big gaps in understanding how things become that way.

Answer 2

I have a few ideas, gleaned from writing exercises that imposed this:

Starting with, avoid misspellings and anything that would be cutsey-wotsey when it comes to dialogue and narrative voice. In dialogue, because it gets really old really fast. And in narrative voice, because the private unfiltered thoughts of people should be sincere and not feigned.

The next is vocabulary. You might consider explicitly selecting the character's vocabulary. Start with an age appropriate grade school vocab-list. You can intentionally mis-define a few so that the character uses them incorrectly but consistently.

Then, write from an experiential and self-centered perspective and not from an idea-abstract perspective. Children's awareness of others is limited, and the world revolves around them.

Similarly, children's abstract reasoning has not yet manifested, so keep things concrete.

Lastly, children are imitative. Echo some of the behaviors and phraseology of the child's parents/caregivers/friends in their dialogue and narrative voice.

Answer 3

If you want to write like a little kid, spent a great deal of time talking to little kids. That's all there is to it.

Sorry to point this out and in terms of Writing, the Question as Posted amounts to a statement of why you won't be able to do it.

If you Asked the same thing somewhere like Psychology, that might be different but in SE Writing, basically, your own wording ruled yourself out.

You won't like this yet to all who care, it matters that "How to Write Like a Little Kid" showed one way to do exactly that, while the adult style would be "How to write like a little kid"

Answer 4

A good place to start is to find some writing samples. If she’s supposed to be ahead of her grade level, these can be a year or two older.

Answer 5

To write the experience of a character, you should know what it's like to be that character.

Try to remember what it was like. Divest your adult persona and indulge your inner self/child and regress, if you will, think: what was it like to be 6 years old? Act out how a kid of that age would and see what dialogue comes out of this.

I know sometimes writing takes you out of your "comfort zone," but this is a great experience -- to allow yourself to be in someone else's shoes, and, if you're successful, the dialogue you need will just flow from you naturally. In a sense, you really will be that person in your own script!

Answer 6

Some suggestions:

As @edl suggested, limit the vocabulary. Prefer short simple words, perhaps with a misplaced longer word here and there.

Use short simple sentences. The exception would be if she was excited. Then you could have her rattle off long, convoluted, breathless sentences full of pauses, but no stops.

As others have said, don't be cutesy, that's not really how kids speak.,