: Books for children: complexity I am wondering how complex the story can be so that small children can understand it (younger than eight). Are there any rules of thumb of how many characters

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In addition to academic knowledge about child development, there's nothing like experiencing real children and seeing how they respond to books. If you don't have young children in your life, I'd suggest "borrowing" some who are within your target age-range and willing to help. See if they understand your story (ask them to explain it-- they may have reached very different conclusions than you intended). See if they like it. Talk to them and find out what their interests are, and what other books they like. Possible ways to find these small workshoppers:

Contact a local teacher or librarian and see if they would be interested in hosting a "meet an aspiring author" session. You could offer to talk about how to write a story as well as sharing your own.
See if any neighbor families would be willing to read your story and give feedback. Kids usually like helping and might feel rather important in this role.
Mail a copy to any young relations and see if they will tell you how they like it (especially if your story is for slighter older/more independent readers).

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Your question relates to the developmental psychology of children more than their capacity to decode text. As such it has very little to do with chronological age because there is so much variation across individuals.

Even though publishers (or booksellers) may want to use labels such as 5-7 year-olds, these are essentially meaningless. The issue is not simply variation across the population because the accessibility for an individual of books written in similar styles will also vary with content.

A reader fascinated by dinosaurs will keep track of four plot lines in three time periods involving 10 Latin names with apparent ease, but then be completely stumped by what (to an editor) seems a simpler book about flowers or fish. The difference lies in background knowledge and intrinsic motivation.

The classic works most often cited are those of Jean Piaget (although he has tended to fall out of fashion). If you are interested in how children handle the progression in complexity of situations, I recommend the SOLO taxonomy of John Biggs as a starting point. Although it was developed for categorising assessment and curriculum tasks, the underlying understanding of number of elements and their inter-relationships applies well to plot construction.

One possible use is in suggesting mechanisms for reducing the demand of a text that you have written but find too complex for your target audience. SOLO gives you a basis for identifying the features that are creating the barriers.

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It's important to keep in mind that children learn to read at slightly different ages and that reading comprehension/ability can vary greatly even among kids the same age. There could be some who are ready to read Harry Potter by themselves starting in first grade (6-7 years old) while their classmates could just be starting to make the shift to easy chapter books.

I don't think that the best way to go about this is to target a specific age group. A better way would probably be to go about figuring where in the progression of learning to read you want your book to fit in - just learning/picture books, books with more words but still a large amount of pictures, easy easy chapter books, chapter books such that a child would find at a Scholastic book fair... up to young adult books (young teens) and older YA books.

Another way to go about this is to just write the story you're trying to write and see how complex it is when it's finished.

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