What to write in a letter to a child

You have decided to write to a child. A grandchild who lives too far away, a godchild you see twice a year, your own child who is at a sleepover or simply down the hall. The pen is ready, the paper is ready, the stamp is ready. Then the page is blank, and you think: what on earth do I put?

Here is what works, from a company that spends its days putting letters through children’s doors. You do not need to be a writer for any of it. You need to be yourself, on paper, for one side of a sheet.

Open with something only you could write

Skip “Dear Sam, I hope you are well.” Begin with the thing that proves it is really you, writing to really them: the nickname nobody else uses, the joke from the last visit, the thing you noticed about them that they don’t know you noticed.

To the only person I know who can do a cartwheel and eat a biscuit at the same time,

Dear you, who I last saw running away from a wave,

A child reads the first line and decides whether the rest is meant for them. Make the first line impossible to doubt.

Tell them one small true thing about your day

Children are curious about grown-up lives in a way grown-ups rarely are about each other’s. Leave out the big news. Give them the small, odd, true thing.

A pigeon walked into the post office this morning and stood in the queue.

I burnt the toast twice and the smoke alarm now thinks we are enemies.

I found your old wellies in the shed and a spider has moved in. I have left it a note.

One detail, told plainly, does more than a paragraph of “we are all well here”. It makes you a person with a day of your own, not just a voice that asks about school.

Ask a question that needs an answer

A letter is half a conversation, and the best ones end with the other half owed. Ask something real, something you genuinely want to know, and something they can answer in a sentence or a drawing.

What is the worst thing in your packed lunch at the moment?

If you could rename the cat, what would you call it?

Which bit of the garden should I dig up when I visit, and what do you think we will find?

Steer clear of questions with a right answer. “How is school?” has one, and it is “fine”. “Who is the funniest person in your class, and what did they do?” does not.

Give them a secret, or a dare

Nothing ties a child to a letter like something only the two of you know. A secret can be tiny. A dare should be safe and slightly silly.

Don’t tell anyone, but I am building something in the garage. Clue: it has a sail.

I dare you to say “crumpet” in a very serious voice at dinner tonight and see if anyone notices.

This letter has a secret code in it. Count the capital letters.

The dare gets reported back. The secret gets kept, which for a seven-year-old is an achievement to be proud of.

Draw in the margin

You can’t draw. It doesn’t matter. A letter with a wobbly dog in the corner beats a letter without one. Draw the pigeon in the post office. Draw a map of where you are sitting. Draw an arrow to one sentence and write “this bit is true”.

A child who gets a letter with drawings in it will write back with drawings in it, and then you have a correspondence instead of a letter.

Write the P.S. with care

Children read the P.S. first. We have watched them do it: flip the page, find the bottom, read the last line, then go back to the top. So put something there worth finding.

P.S. The thing in the garage is nearly finished.

P.S. Your mum says you lost a tooth. I have questions. How big was it? Did it hurt? Where is it now?

P.S. There is a second letter coming. It is about the spider.

The best kind of P.S. promises something later. It turns one letter into the start of something.

Keep it short, and legible

One side of a page, two at the very most. A child’s attention for the written word is precious and runs out, and you want them to reach the P.S. with some of it to spare. If you have more to say, that is next week’s letter.

Short also means readable. Write a little bigger than usual, with a pen that works, on paper that is not the back of something else.

Write it by hand if you can

A typed letter is a letter. A handwritten one is a piece of you. Your handwriting is as particular as your voice, and a child who gets letters from you will come to know it from the envelope alone, which is a small, real kind of love.

If your hand is unsteady or your writing is dreadful, write anyway. “Grandpa’s writing” is something a child remembers fondly, however it looks.

Post it, even from the same house

This is the step people skip. Don’t hand the letter over. Put it in an envelope, write their name on the front, stick on a real stamp, and post it. Even if you live three streets away. Even if you live in the same house and have to post it on the way to work.

The stamp is half the magic. A letter that comes through the door with their name on it, in among the bills and the pizza menus, is an event. A letter handed across the dinner table is a note. The words are the same. The letter is not.

If you would rather a story did the writing

Some people, having read all this, will still find the blank page hard, and some children would rather have a story than news from the post office. That is more or less why we started Journee. At the rhythm you choose, a letter arrives with the child’s name on the front, a chapter of a story inside in which they are the hero and their family are in the cast, and a P.S. that asks them to choose what happens next. Our team writes and draws the story, with your child and their people woven into it. You can read how it works at /how-it-works, and why we insisted on real post rather than email in why post, not email.

Whichever you choose, the advice is the same. Write to the child in front of you, ask them something real, and put a stamp on it.