Find the Kid-Friendly Connection That Makes Kids Want to Know and Embrace New Heroes

By Nancy Churnin

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How do you get kids interested in heroes and heroines
they’ve never heard about before?
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Find the kid-connection.

Here are three ways I’ve done that:
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1. Start with a moment from your main character’s childhood that establishes the dream that he or she will pursue during the story.

This is the most common approach and the one I’ve taken with most of my books. You’ll see on the opening page a kid that a child can relate to, longing for a goal that the reader will root for the character to achieve.
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• William Hoy wanting to be a great ballplayer in The William Hoy Story, How a Deaf Baseball Player Changed the Game
• Charlie Sifford wanting to be a great golfer in Charlie Takes His Shot, How Charlie Sifford Broke the Color Barrier in Golf
• Irving Berlin wanting to find a way to thank the country that gave him his “home sweet home” in Irving Berlin, the Immigrant Boy Who Made America Sing
• Queen Charlotte wanting to share the beauty of plants and the joy of Christmas in The Queen and the First Christmas Tree, Queen Charlotte’s Gift to England
• Laura Wheeler Waring wanting everyone to see, through her art, the beautiful skin tones and spirits of her family and friends in Beautiful Shades of Brown, The Art of Laura Wheeler Waring
• Katharine Lee Bates searching for a way to heal a country divided by Civil War in For Spacious Skies, Katharine Lee Bates and the Inspiration for “America the Beautiful”
• Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Anne Frank as beloved babies in Martin & Anne, with the parallel illustrations of their families’ love for them reminding us that all babies are beautiful and deserving of love.  

2. Find a kid-friendly image or association:

In A Queen to the Rescue, the Story of Henrietta Szold, Founder of Hadassah, I introduced Henrietta’s admiration and desire to be like Queen Esther, the heroine who saved her people and is honored during Purim. Purim is a kid-friendly Jewish holiday that focuses on dressing up, eating delicious Hamentashen cookies and shaking noisemakers. The kid-friendly aspect of the holiday, with her sisters dressing up and enjoying the festivities, is emphasized on the first page. But the Queen Esther theme carries throughout the book as we see ways in which Henrietta finds ways to help and save people. 

3. Find a universal theme to which kids can relate:

Manjhi Moves a Mountain and Dear Mr. Dickens both start with the main characters as adults, but both connect with children that embrace the universal theme of doing something about an unfair situation.

Manjhi feels the unfairness of the children of his village being unable to go to school, the sick being able to get to a doctor, the elderly and infirm struggling to get to markets because there is a 300-foot mountain separating his village from the one that has all those things. He comes up with a solution and perseveres, despite ridicule, until he succeeds in making his community better for everyone. Kids and adults alike respond to the message that we can all move mountains – or make a positive difference in our world -- if our hearts are big enough.

Eliza Davis in Dear Mr. Dickens is a young mother with a child when she decides to write to the most famous author of her day, Charles Dickens, to tell him how hurtful his creation of the Jewish villain Fagin is to the Jewish community. The universal theme here is the importance of speaking up to people in positions of power and influence when they have done something wrong or hurtful, but also, when and if they redeem themselves, to forgive.

The one thing all three methods have in common is that they get kids invested in the main character or characters from the first page, wanting to know what happens next. You have to keep a child’s attention for anything else in the story to matter.

GIVEAWAY

Nancy will be giving away one copy of Dear Mr. Dickens to one reader selected from among those that post a photo and comment about one of Nancy’s books and tags her on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram with the additional hashtag #blogfishpost. The more posts, the more chances of winning!

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