Writing for the Child You Used to Be

I wrote my first children's poem on a Tuesday afternoon in the middle of writing something entirely different. I was working on a piece for work, something serious and grown-up, and midway through, a line appeared in my head that didn't belong. It was about a pirate. A cardboard pirate in a garden, guarding treasure in a sandbox. I stared at it. It had nothing to do with what I was writing. But it made me smile in a way a serious poem hadn't.

So I followed it. That line became a poem. That poem became a collection. And that collection, Through Squinted Eyes, became the book I didn't know I needed to write.

There is something that happens inside when you write for children. Or rather, when you write as a child. Because that is what it really is. You are not writing down to anyone. You are climbing back up into a way of seeing that you lost somewhere between homework and rent and the weight of being a person in the world. You are squinting your eyes the way you did when you were small, when squinting could turn a street lamp into a star and a puddle into a portal to another dimension.

Children do not see the world as it is. They see it as it could be. A stick is not a stick. It is a wand, a sword, a fishing rod, a magic staff, a conductor's baton — all before lunchtime. A cardboard box is a spaceship, a castle, a racing car, a cave. The gap between what something is and what a child makes of it — that gap is where the poetry lives.

I wanted to write poems that honoured that gap. That took it seriously. Because the imaginative life of a child is not silly or frivolous. It is essential. It is how they learn to navigate a world that is too big and too complicated to face head-on. When a child turns their backyard into an ocean and themselves into a captain, they are not avoiding reality. They are rehearsing for it. They are practising bravery in a space where the stakes are small and the adventures are endless.

Writing these poems took me back to my own childhood in ways I did not expect. I remembered things I thought I had forgotten. The feeling of lying in the grass and watching clouds turn into animals. The absolute conviction that the space under the stairs was haunted. The way a rainy day could be devastating at breakfast and the greatest adventure in the world by noon. I remembered what it was like to live in a body that hadn't learned to sit still. To have legs that wanted to run and a voice that wanted to sing and a mind that built entire worlds between the school gate and the front door.

In some of my poems, that is the child I wrote for. Not any child. My child self. The one who believed impossible things before breakfast. The one who was afraid of the dark but walked into it anyway because curiosity was always bigger than fear.

I think every poet carries their childhood inside them like a room they keep returning to. For some it is a bright room full of light. For others it is more complicated. But it is always there, shaping everything they write, whether they know it or not. Children's poetry gave me a key to that room. It let me walk back in and sit on the floor and see everything again with the eyes I used to have.

There is a particular challenge in writing poetry for young readers. Every word has to earn its place. You cannot hide behind complexity or abstraction. A child will not pretend to understand something they don't, and they will not pretend to enjoy something that bores them. They are the most honest audience a poet will ever face. If the poem doesn't land, they will simply walk away and go build something with Lego. And honestly, that is a gift. It makes you a better writer. It forces you to be clear, vivid, musical, and true.

I also learned that the best children's poems are not just for children. They are for anyone who needs to remember what it felt like before the world told them to grow up and be reasonable. Before wonder became childish and imagination became impractical. The poems in Through Squinted Eyes are for children, yes — but they are also for the parent reading aloud at bedtime who suddenly feels something crack open inside them. For the teacher who stops mid-sentence because a line in a poem transported them back thirty years. For anyone who has ever looked at a child playing alone in a garden and felt a pang of something they couldn't name.

That pang is recognition. It is your own childhood waving at you from across the years, saying — I'm still here. You just stopped by, visiting. Make yourself comfortable.

Sometimes, I write about kids and nature. Sometimes, I write about love, loss and resilience, the cosmos and the great big complicated beauty of being alive. But writing for children taught me something none of those subjects could. It taught me that the most important things in life — courage, wonder, kindness, imagination — we understood them perfectly when we were small. Kids don't need anyone to explain them. They live them. Every single day, between breakfast and bedtime, we lived them too.

Growing up is necessary. But growing up doesn't have to mean growing away from the part of you that once believed a cardboard hat could make you a captain.

Through Squinted Eyes is my love letter to that belief. To the child I was. To the child in every reader. To the wild, wonderful, illogical certainty that the world is full of magic if you just close your eyes halfway and look.

Come in. Big adventures await.