Too risque for children?

It's not about the risqueness, it's about whether this rings true as the behavior of the three year old. In general, no. But kids copy their parents. But that would be a whole nother story.

You've got a stuffed monkey recalling its time in the jungle...

This would seem to imply that the monkey was once a real, live monkey, but is now stuffed?

Your wording is strange. Kids don't see a cartoon of a bare baby butt and say "Cool! Human butts!" If anything, a 3 year-old would be more likely to run up and ask for a banana. They only find anatomical humor funny because it's "forbidden" and makes people react strangely. Kids pick up on that. Why would a creature with a tail have a hang-up about their posterior to the point that 1 - little monkey finds it offensively funny and 2 - Mama monkey corrects him for being rude to "a little girl." (Which is, in itself problematic. She wouldn't have minded him making fun of a boy monkey's behind? Not to mention being "flipped" behind the ear. That's not exactly something modern readers would welcome in a child's book.)

It's also pretty wordy for a picture book. You need to streamline it.

I'm with Debbie -- if I heard a three-year-old boy respond to a passing girl with 'Sweet! Butt!' I would be rather disturbed and wonder about his home life.

I also truly LOVE this part and so am torn.

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Be wary of the passages you love most. They're often the ones in dire need of cutting / alteration. In bluntest terms, this passage does not work in this capacity. At all.

I didn't get the ear 'flipping' until Cyia noted it. I thought you meant like flipping hair, not hitting. Not cool.

Also, not for nothing, but 'she was so pretty.... her fur was lighter in colour than ours...' is going to cause a kerfuffle and a half too.

Please don't take this as me harping on you. I don't intend it this way, but this:

It is a little too long for a picture book, but definitely for children eight to ten maybe

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isn't realistic for current readers, either.

In general, kids "read up," meaning that 8-10 year old kids are firmly in the MG to lower YA range. They're reading books about 11-13 year olds. You *might* be able to slip into the Junie B Jones crowd, and find readers in the chapter book range, but I think you might benefit from some time on the Blueboards (a children's writing site). You need to lock down the basics first, then you can craft your story for the audience you intend to reach.

It can be frustrating (been there, done that, tried to make it rhyme...), but a strong foundation will make the building easier. Don't give up on your monkey; just make him more age and market appropriate. And please, continue to ask for help when you need it. Outside eyes can often see what closer ones overlook.

I could actually see a story of an irreverent, silly stuffed monkey taking off among young readers who enjoy stuff like Captain Underpants. That's not my part of the MG woods though so I can't really offer any advice. Except the generic: read what you want to write. Go out and find popular (recent) books that are for the same target audience. That's the best place to start, regardless of genre.

In my experience, pre-pubescent kids find everything to do with sex, love and kissing to be disgustingly soppy, and their reaction to it (in films, TV, books etc) is "ewww" - not actual disgust, but just finding the whole thing nauseatingly twee and soppy. They haven't yet experienced sexual attraction, so why would they relate to characters who are sexually attracted to each other? It's much less about what parents find risque and far more about what's going to make kids run a mile in the opposite direction.

Kids find jokes about bottoms, underwear, toilet humour etc funny, because, as mentioned upthread, it's not something they're allowed to talk about in polite conversation. There are plenty of children's writers who exploit this to the max (Captain Underpants springs to mind) but they don't include references to sexuality. Maybe you could keep the fact that he says "butt" but remove all sexual innuendo. For example: maybe he sees a baboon with a brightly coloured butt and makes a comment about it.

As a mother of girls, I don't like girl characters who are just there to look pretty because they're giving the implicit message that girls aren't supposed to do active, fun things, and instead are just there to look pretty for the boys. This is my main reaction to the scene of the boy monkey making comments like that about a girl monkey. Granted his mother tells him off, but it's still a female character who's there to look pretty rather than doing anything active (at least in the bit you describe... maybe she's more active later on in the story?) The baboon suggestion (or anything along those lines) would remove this issue.

The only thing is that the biology nerd in me wants to say that a baboon is a kind of monkey, but as long as you don't say anything like "that's not a monkey it's a baboon" you're okay.

I'm glad you decided to cut the bit, appealing as it sounds for youngsters, and it took me a while to figure out why it bothered me. Essentially this is a boy, with all innocent intentions, sexually harassing a girl long before he has any idea what sexual harassment is. Unfortunately, this is a serious enough problem in teens (and older) that I suppose I just dislike the idea of making small children think it's funny. Yes, they may get that idea themselves, but at least we don't want to reinforce it.

Please understand I'm not accusing you of such an attitude, just that an innocent childish joke can have overtones of which children themselves are completely unaware.

Also, to add to what I said, I think the concept of the stuffed monkey getting into all kinds of mischief I think would be very appealing to kids aged around 6-10. And also I'd probably enjoy reading it to my kids, which is a major factor to take into account when marketing books for kids.

grandma2isaac said:

Munkie is stuffed (he actually lives in our house where all of the stuffed animals have voices and their own foibles and back stories), but he doesn't realize it.

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You might consider whether you mean him to be a real little monkey who somehow became a stuffed animal, an actual stuffed animal, or a real little monkey who just happens to look like Munkie.

Stories about stuffed animals have a solid history: 'The Velveteen Rabbit', 'Winnie the Pooh' and 'Corduroy' (stuffed bear), etc. If you've already got a bunch of stuffed animal character with voices, foibles and backstories, maybe use that as a starting point instead of the jungle? Instead of his mama-monkey, maybe his 'mother' was the oldest stuffed animal, who taught him about humans when he was brought home from the toy-store? He can have adventures outside, a la Winnie-the-Pooh, and interact with both toys and select humans.

If you've already got lots of ideas for stories, maybe consider what background would work better for them, and work backwards?

*And if everyone's a stuffed animal, if one of them is an elephant, plenty of scope for 'butt' jokes. (And, Steiff used to make a plush Coco the monkey with a bright red butt.)

This is still really wordy for a picture book (you've got some leeway if it's for a chapter book), but the bigger issue with this version is that you're "teaching" first and telling a story second. Kids don't want lessons; they want entertainment. They want the story.

It's like grinding up carrots into a cupcake or pureeing beets so that a picky eater doesn't realize they've been cooked into the spaghetti sauce. You have to hide the parts a kid might hone in on as *ack! education!!!* so they think they're getting away with frivolous things. The message will still get into their brains.

(A decent / recent example of this is Zootopia. On the surface it's a fluffy bunny cop, but look deeper and it's aiming for something more nuanced.)

It's very, as the saying goes, on the nose.

The lesson isn't hidden or subtle -- I think the issue may be you seem to be conflating age ranges for stuff in a way. For very small kids, picture-book age, you can put lessons more to the forefront, both because the kids are not sophisticated, and because you have far fewer words to work with. You still do have to be somewhat subtle, but it can be clearer. Like that owl book, the title of which I don't recall, in which the parent owl goes out hunting and the baby owl is alone in the nest and gets scared and says so. That's basically the book, baby owl is scared but parent owl comes back and they're all safe together again, and parent owl says he or she will always come back don't worry, or something. It still, within the maybe 300 words, works in other story around that, but that's the gist, iirc.

You're trying for a lot more complexity, aimed at kids much older, who don't want to hear a very obvious lesson. They want to read a cool, funny story (or a scary story, or whatever). If that happens to teach a lesson, parents are into it, kids aren't. Same as Cyia said above. It's parents excited about recipes that put spinach in brownies. No kid in the history of brownies ever decided 'hey, can you put spinach in these?' even if the kid likes spinach. Hell, I love spinach, I'm not putting it in brownies for god's sakes. If you tell a kid a brownie has spinach in it, they do not think that's cool, they think you're a monster who ruined brownies, even if they loved the brownies 2 seconds ago.

Kids hundreds of years ago didn't like fairy tales because they taught important lessons like not to go off with witches in the woods. They liked them because they're scary stories.

It can't be obvious. Same as adult things. Someone mentioned Ferris Bueller in another thread -- there's a very, very obvious 'message' in that movie. It's not on the poster, you know? No one says 'come see Guardians of the Galaxy to learn that friendship is important.'

I'm not sure how you'd market a short story for this age unless maybe you're looking to submit it to some of the kids' magazines that accept submissions, but if you're wanting to work this into picture book, the best exercise I can offer is to get a sheet of lined paper, number it 1-32 (as PBs are printed in 8-page sheets). X-out pages 1 & 2 for the front matter (maybe 32 for back matter).

Now, among the remaining pages, envision the images you'd want in the book. Write descriptions down on their "page," and once you've done, go back and make some concise, crisp text to accompany those picks. You'll have maybe 10-15 words for each page.

If you're writing a short story for the magazine market, read the magazines and look them up online. Guidelines are available for almost all of them. Evelyn Christensen's site may be of some use: http://www.evelynchristensen.com/writers.html

Also, yes to the Blueboards and check out Harold Underdown's site. Everything you need to know about writing for kids is in these two places.