A big mistake that I see authors make frequently is when they make deep subject matter incomprehensible to small children. They act like the toddler character in the scene isn’t going to understand things like death, to the point that the child won’t even speak. 

Why is that a mistake? Well, there’s two big reasons: 1) Toddlers hear everything you’re saying and have an opinion on it all, even if they don’t fully understand what’s going on, they just like to be a part of the conversation, and 2) Toddlers can understand deep subjects if they are explained correctly.

Perhaps the best example I have is death. While I was watching my three-year-old niece, one of my guinea pigs died. It had given birth about three weeks before, and had seemed healthy, so it was really out of the blue, and it confused my niece. 

“Auntie, the guinea pig not moving.” I went over to check, and, sure enough, the mommy piggy was dead. I took it outside and buried it, came back in, and she wanted to know where the mommy guinea pig was. I told her that she died, so I had to bury her. “Is she gonna come back?” I explained that no, she wasn’t, that when something died it couldn’t come back anymore, and she understood completely. 

It horrified her, she cried a little, and for the next three weeks she repeated about thirty times a day, “The mommy guinea pig died, so she can’t come back no more, right, Auntie?”, but she understood. She also addressed her feelings about it, too. “I don’t want that the mommy guinea pig died; I want her come back.” “It makes me sad the mommy guinea pig died.” “The baby guinea pigs miss the mommy. They’re sad, too.”

Death is a big subject for kids, but, at three years old, my niece experienced it, understood it, and addressed its consequences and her feelings about those consequences, all with a very minimal explanation about what death actually was. 

When our uncle died, I had a very similar conversation with my 2-year-old cousin. “Uncle in heaven? Like grandpa? He not here. I miss uncle. Uncle not come back.” At two years old, she was able to process death and its consequences. 

It isn’t only things like death and heaven that kids can process. I’ve had riveting conversations with a bunch of four and five-year-olds about driving laws, the election process, science, space travel, animal rights, personal safety, and much more. There is very little that is “over their heads” when it comes to young children, and even most of those things can be understood with a pretty simple, basic explanation. They might not have much information on certain subjects (like taxes and driving laws), but they are very open to learn, and they WANT to discuss these things with grown ups that they respect, and who respect them in return.

So don’t shy away from deeper or more difficult subjects with your young characters; they can handle it. Just keep things simple, on their level. A toddler isn’t going to discuss the finer details of microeconomics, but they can understand that if we want to take this toy home from the store, we have to give the cashier the money that they earned doing chores.