| abstract | - Toddlers can form complex ideas and speak in full sentences. Eight year-olds are looking for their true love. Your fourteen-year old will often fret about work and already be looking to settle down with their high school sweethearts. A group of nine-year olds will bike on down to the next town with no parents in tow. The seven-year old kid down the street will never eat a bunch of sugar and cry because he didn't get the toy he wanted; he's too busy planning out a zany, very involved scheme to get what he wants. You may have noticed that children in fiction are... not exactly like their Real Life audience. There's a good reason for this. Any fictional depiction of young people is going to be viewed through the lens of an adult. Most writers aren't themselves children. They tend not to be child psychologists either. If they don't happen to have children, but must write young characters, they tend to end up with characters who are tiny adults. The characters are physically children but they are still treated as adults in most situations (except for when plot calls attention to it). This is usually in terms of personality, how they react to situations, and the situations that they get into in the first place, which tend to involve plot points generally associated with more mature series. This is significantly more prevalent in animated shows starring kid characters, since it's easier to get an adult voice actor to act like an adult than to get a live action child actor to act like one, naturally. Often a staple of ongoing series that use Adults Are Useless, the Kid Hero, or really anything where kids are the main characters but the series is targeted towards all ages. This is an omnipresent trope. In general, fictional children tend to act at least five years older than their stated age. There is some overlap with Wise Beyond Their Years, but that trope deals with cases where one or two characters act like this. Part of the problem with writers writing like a child is that their writing sounds childish - which is why this is an omnipresent trope. Also, do not underestimate children; there are pre-adolescents who vaguely understand sexual matters from an intellectual viewpoint, read encyclopedias and other adult literature, and in the past were apprentices in various trades - so they cannot afford to act or speak childishly. Please note that there is an inverse function to this trope - most writers are adults, but are so aware they're writing for children that certain activities will be excised from underage characters even if it's realistic for that age. So your sixteen-year-old won't be dying to get laid; they're searching for true love, and all relationship interactions will be completely romantic rather than sexual (excepting asexual characters). And they'll never smoke, drink, or get high unless it's a Very Special Episode or the character's an antagonist. Also note that children acting in ways that they shouldn't be able to, i.e. like adults, is also a common go-to Horror Trope. See also Improbable Age and Vague Age. Sometimes results in Menace Decay. Compare Most Writers Are Human. Examples of Most Writers Are Adults include:
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