The hardest part of writing for your child is not finding the words. It is believing you have time. You will write something when they are older. When things are calmer. When you have something important to say.
But the ordinary moments — the ones that contain who you really are — are happening now, while they are still learning their ABCs. And the person who writes to them from inside those moments is someone they will never get to meet any other way.
Here are 17 things worth writing while they are still too young to read them.
1. The day they were born — from your perspective, not theirs
They will hear the story of their birth many times. They will not hear what you were thinking in the hour before. Write that.
2. What you were afraid of, as a parent, in the first week
Not the competent retrospective. The real fear from the real moment, when you did not know what you were doing yet.
3. The first time they did something that made you laugh unexpectedly
The specific thing. The sound they made. The look on their face. Write it before you cannot remember the exact detail.
4. What you want for them that you cannot give them
Every parent has something they wish they could hand over but cannot. A relationship. A quality. A kind of ease with the world. Write that letter.
5. The version of the world you are handing them
Not an apology. A context. What the world looks like right now, in this year, from where you are standing. They will want to know.
6. A habit of yours they will not understand until they are older
The thing you do that will seem strange to them as a child and obvious to them at 35. Write the explanation now so they have it when they arrive there.
7. Something your own parent said to you that you think about still
The sentence. The exact words, if you can remember them. Where you were when they said it. Why it stayed.
8. What you hope they find easier than you did
Not advice. A wish. The specific thing you struggled with that you hope landed differently in them.
9. The thing about raising them that nobody prepared you for
Not the practical things. The interior thing. The part of parenthood that surprised you about yourself.
10. A message for the year they turn 18
What do you want them to know at the beginning of their adult life? Write it now, when they are small, and you are still figuring it out yourself.
11. A message for the year they turn 30
Thirty is specific. It has a texture. Write to the person they will be at thirty — who you hope they will be, what you hope they will have learned — from the year they were two.
12. The thing you love about this age they are at right now
Every age is unrepeatable. Write what is specific to this one — what they do right now that will be gone by next year and forgotten by the time they are reading this.
13. A description of an ordinary day
Not a special day. A Tuesday. What the house sounds like. What the morning looks like. What a regular afternoon with them in it actually feels like.
14. Something you got wrong and what you learned from it
Not to burden them with your regret. To show them that their parent was a person who made mistakes and tried to understand them.
15. What they taught you about yourself
Children reveal things about their parents that nothing else does. Write what you found out about yourself because of them.
16. The advice you hope they never need but might
The hard kind. The kind you hope the world never gives them a reason to use. Write it anyway, carefully, so it is there if they need it.
17. Why you wrote any of this at all
Close with the simplest letter: why you sat down to write these things when they could not read yet. What you wanted them to understand about the person who was their parent, in this specific year, before they were old enough to remember it.
You do not have to write all seventeen today. You do not have to write them in order. Start with the one that feels most urgent, most true, most like something future you would be grateful you saved. Then schedule it. Let it wait for the day they are ready.