How do you write dialogue for young children?

Getting yourself into the headspace to write from different perspectives or for different audiences is not always easy. A big thing to remember is that how something feels for a reader and how realistic it is are not always the same thing, so it’s okay to go on vibes rather than realism.

Over my years of writing, I have learned that "sounding like" someone is almost never about transcribing them accurately. It's about representing their rhythm, habits, and motivation to give a reader the impression of voice.

Dialogue should feel realistic, not be realistic

All dialogue in fiction is an illusion. No one wants to read dialogue that perfectly mimics speech.

Real conversations are full of false starts, mumbling, filler, and tangents. Writing it faithfully to real life would make it close to unreadable. On the page, you get to distil your dialogue into a version of speech that feels truer to life than an accurate transcription. This becomes even more necessary when writing in a child’s voice.

Real toddler speech can be hard to follow, even for the people closest to them. They’re still learning and growing. They mispronounce things, can’t always make the right connections between sound, meaning, and object, and have wild imaginations that can be really hard to keep up with. If you try and represent their speech exactly, you’re very likely to lose your readers (unless you’re making an intentional choice based on your story’s context). Instead, what you want to do is give your reader a sense of their age using a handful of well-chosen signposts. It’s not about trying to prove you know exactly how a child sounds, but more about making the reader believe that’s what they sound like within the context of your work.

Who are you writing for?

You’ve not specified in your question, so I think it’s important to highlight the fact that you need to know who your audience is to know how to write for them. Why are you writing a child’s voice? Is it because you’re writing for children, about children, or just including a child in a novel written about and for adults?

If you’re writing for children, then you need to think about how they will read the dialogue. It has to work for them and be something that feels relatable. 

If you’re writing something to be read aloud by adults, then rhythm, repetition, and a bit of whimsical silliness is more important that whether the dialogue feels believable. 

Older children reading alone want characters who feel like friends, but no matter what, if your audience is children, then you’ll want your dialogue to be a little sharper, funnier, and slightly more articulate than a child in real life. 

If you’re writing a child into an adult novel, then your readers are adults. In that case, the child serves a very different function. Here, the child will serve a narrative purpose, which could be anything from making a parent’s choices harder, saying something out loud that the adults in the novel won’t, or carrying an emotional weight. 

Even if a child is the POV character in an adult novel, it will change the way you represent their voice. They’ll notice things, misunderstand them, and have a completely different way of describing what’s around them. But you also get their internal monologue, which can help contextualise what is actually said. You get to construct a child’s voice to feel how adults would interpret it, rather writing true to life. 

Whatever your reasons for writing in a child’s voice, you need to know why you’re doing it, and who you’re doing it for.  

How do you signal a child’s age?

There are a few habits that readers can recognise as signalling a child’s age. The milestone checklists published by the CDC are a good place to check the broad strokes.

At two, speech is short and mostly about the here and now. Two-word phrases ("More milk"), lots of single words, plenty of naming, use of the word "no," and repeating whatever was just said.  A lot of communication is also done through gesture, rather than verbally.

At three, children are usually more able to hold conversations. They will ask questions, like "Where is Mummy?", or "Why?, use longer sentences,  and use grammar that follows its own logic ("I runned," "she goed").

At four, children can string a proper sentence together, tell you about their day, argue, explain, and bend the truth with great confidence. There will be greater variation as they start school and internalise more from their education and surroundings, and they’ll also start to express more of their own, unique interests and quirks.

Real children vary wildly, and a chatty two-year-old can easily out-talk a quiet four-year-old. Ultimately, you need to write dialogue and voice in a way that is true to the character and can be justified by the context of the story you’re telling, rather than attempting to represent an age group in its archetypal form.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach

There is no single way to write about children, or to construct their dialogue. I know that seems unhelpful, but there’s no point in trying to create a magic bullet that simply can’t exist. So much of how you will write a child and their voice will depend on the type of story you’re telling, and who your audience is, so it’s something you always need to have in mind (for any character, not just children).

What you can do is ask a few questions of your own story. What is this child there to do? Who is reading, and what do they expect? How much of the child’s head do you get access to? 

It also helps to remember that children are individuals. A four-year-old who spends most of their time around adults will talk differently to one who spends it with older siblings, and a shy or anxious child may not speak much at all, but really open up when they feel comfortable. 

Giving your character a specific personality will often do more for the dialogue than any list of childhood milestones, because it gives your writing reason and context. If you can explain why this particular child would say this particular thing, your reader will usually believe it.

If you’re ever unsure, look at books that have a similar audience and purpose to yours. Pay attention to how  those writers write children, how much realistic childhood speech cadence is actually on the page, and what the dialogue is doing in the scene. The best way to learn apart from actually writing, is close readings of the works of others so you can gain knowledge from those who came before.