I’ve been reading some fics with lil kids in them recently, and it’s been a bit hit-and-miss, and dialogue especially can get a bit jarring. Writing kids’ dialogue/action is REALLY hard, and sometimes a little nudge can help. 🙂

How to help, though? I decided to take some notes and make a little reference sheet for folks out there who don’t often get to interact with small persons, but like to write kidfic!

So, for reference – my child is 2 years and 10 months old – very bright, happy, funny, loud and super-active. Loves books, singing, words, the alphabet, numbers, dinosaurs, music, ballerinas, and puzzles. She can count to thirty, and will point out the beginning letter of any word a million times (”DOUBYOU IS FOR WHALE! Is for Whale, Mummy!”).

• Speaks in third person sometimes, ‘MUMMY, OH! OH! [HER NAME] FELL OVER! OW! [HER NAME] HURT MY KNEE!” (and yes, she will mix up ‘my’ and ‘her’ because fuck third person/first person rules when you are two and cute as a button and just banged your knee.)

• Has never used ‘Me loves’ or ‘Me wants’. EVER. I have never, ever, EVER heard a real living child use this ‘me’ instead of ‘I’ thing, and it’s ubiquitous in fic. It’s inescapable! Seriously. They get the difference between ‘me’ and ‘I’ REALLY FAST. If anything, they mix up ‘I’ and ‘I’m’ more often.

• Mixes up who she’s speaking to – a LOT. I have been called everything from ‘Daddy’ to the cat’s name to the name of her daycare provider’s husband.

• “Vegables” (I will be sad when this one disappears!)

• When she got the hang of ‘-s’ to mean a plural, she started saying ‘sick’ instead of ‘six’. One, two, three, four, five, sick, seven. Because an ‘-s’ sound on the end meant that there was more than one six, yeah? Perfectly logical!

• “I done” (I did), “I taked” (I took), “I putted” (I put). Past tense is difficult.  

• And mixing up which tense in a full sentence, yup, it happens. “Mummy! I want going for a WALK!” “Mummy, I’m swinged on a swing!”

• “Lellow” instead of ‘Yellow’. She knows it begins with ‘Y’ – she just says ‘Lellow!’ Probably because it is more fun to say.

• When she was learning to count to twenty, she would count EVERYTHING. And also make up the names of new numbers when she couldn’t think of them. So. Much. Counting.

• Related – SO. MUCH. ALPHABET. ‘Lion is an L! Doubyou is for WATERMELON!’

• “Wiv” actually happens. Who knew?

• I spin like a ballelina! Look mummy! I’m a beeyootiful Ballellina!

• for that matter, longer words like ‘beautiful’ don’t get shortened. They get ELONGATED. She sounds out every vowel and dipthong, quite stretched out. “Ohhh. Is so beeyootiful.” Hearing the word ‘hippopotamus’ is a lengthy experience.

• ‘No’ is a favourite word. It follows words, it precedes words, it is a complete sentence in itself. Always always always. No fic I have ever read ever shows the epic, EPIC overuse of NO in a toddler’s lexicon. Also, “I don’t WANT to/it” vs “I want it!!”

• Repetition, endless ENDLESS repetition. Toddlers love repeating the last thing you say, too. So watch that language 😉

• The ‘fwee’ instead of ‘three’ thing isn’t every kid, jeez. She can say ‘three’ perfectly well, and has been able to for at least a year. She can say GARDENING and HEXAGON and RHINOCEROS and DINOSAUR, ferchrissakes.

• Likewise, a lisp and the ‘fw’ thing are not interchangeable to show ‘toddler speak’. A kid might have one of these, but it’s insanely unlikely to have BOTH.

• Mixing up sentence order happens quite a lot! “It’s dinner time! Mummy, the clock is on sick! Is dinner time!” (The hand of the clock is on six – time for dinner!)

• Context will often be completely ?????. She had quite a tantrum the other night because Daddy was going to give her three ‘stories’ after bath. We were confused – she LOVES reading, and always gets three books after bath, before bed. She absolutely adores it. But no, she didn’t want three STORIES – she wanted three books. To us, that was the same thing, but to her she wasn’t equating ‘story’ with ‘storybook’.

• Likewise, when I asked her to point to something she wanted, she pointed her foot and said ‘point!’ I had meant to point her finger… but she didn’t know that it was CALLED ‘pointing’ her finger… she only knew ‘point’ in the context of pointing her foot!

• Oh yes, vocalising/narrating everything she does. “I’m patting the pussycat!” “I’m bouncing on the bed!” “I’m riding the scootah!” (she totally says SCOOTAH) “I’m eating the peeeeeeeas!” “I’m playing the tea party!” “I’m in the bath!” “I’m on the toylut!” All. The. Time.

• Incomprehensible mumbles between intelligble words every now and then. Her mouth can’t keep up, you see 🙂 So you end up with ‘MUMMY, (mumbleumble) a biscuit!’ You get the general gist, but the interim of the sentence is totally lost.

• ‘Is’ begins a lot of declarations, rather than ‘It Is.” So, “Is a butterfly!” “Is a pajamas!” “Is a dragonfruit!” “Is a tea party!”

• Gets finicky about food, even food she usually LOVES. They love to test things at this age! Also, bedtime manipulation tactics, to delay lights-off. Sneaky af. Her current one is to yell ‘help help!!’ the minute we turn off the light and shut her bedroom door – god knows what the neighbours think!!

• Alternatively clingy as hell/independent as hell. One day you might love to have a cuddle, but she won’t even look up at you. Ah well! The next day, you can’t pry her off you. HUH. One day, “I CAN DO [HER NAME] SHOES UP MYSELF!” and the next: “Mummyyyyyyyy, I want to putting on my dressing down” (she means dressing gown – and I have to do it for her – and I gotta put mine on too, or we don’t match and she will get the grizzles)

• THE SULKS. Even the most chill, even-tempered toddler will get the sulks sometimes. Perhaps after being told, ‘you shouldn’t play with [dangerous thing] because you might hurt yourself’ for instance. That’s ok and normal – some feelings are very big for a very small person to manage! Tantrums happen too: don’t shy away from making your cute little kid a REAL cute little kid, with all the socially-inappropriate little-kid reactions, whining, sulking and screaming in public and all. It makes the cuddly little toddler-hugs even more special.

• Demanding things, sometimes very rudely or imperiously, because manners are difficult to remember. They will NOT always say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ – you gotta prompt them to say it. (When they DO say it without prompting? *ANGELIC CHOIR*)

• Ending a sentence before it is finished. For example, “Mummy, I put my gumboots!” The word ‘on’ SHOULD be at the end, of course, but the important word to her is GUMBOOTS, because they are new and she loves them. So. Much. So the sentence ends there!

• Oh yes, there’s always the mispronounced word that, no matter how many times you gently correct it, no matter how many times she repeats it properly, stubbornly remains mispronounced. Ours are currently ‘dressing down’, ‘vegebles’ ‘ballellina’ and ‘airloplane.’ AND SIX. oh my god, lmao I love that one.

So, there we have it, a little assortment of things a real toddler says, complete with syntax and context. Use them wisely, and have fun writing those kid characters.

(any other parents/guardians/teachers/carers out there, feel free to add!)