Christine French Cully - Dear Highlights: What Adults Can Learn from 75 Years of Letters and Conversations with Kids

Highlights complies fully with the requirements of the Childrens Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). When we receive letters via email, we do not save any personally identifiable information. In this book, all the names of children whose letters were not originally published in the magazines have been changed to protect their identity. Any identifying information that appeared in handwritten letters has been erased.

The letters, emails, and poems published in this book that are written by children have not been edited or changed. In rare cases, it was necessary to shorten the letters. All text appears as it was presented in the original correspondence, including any typos, spelling, and punctuation errors. The replies written by Highlights for Children that are published in this book were edited only to avoid repetition and correct typos or punctuation errors.

Copyright 2021 by Highlights for Children

All rights reserved. Copying this book for storage, display, or distribution in any other medium is strictly prohibited.

For information about permission to reprint selections from this book, please contact .

Published by Highlights Press

815 Church Street

Honesdale, Pennsylvania 18431

ISBN: 978-1-64472-325-8

eBook ISBN: 978-1-64472-390-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021932932

Visit our website at Highlights.com .

Design and Art Direction: Red Herring Design

Production: Margaret Mosomillo, Jessica Berger, and Lauren Garofano

Cover Design: Red Herring Design

Cover Illustration: Serge Bloch

Interior Illustrations: Serge Bloch, Nic Farrell, Travis Foster, and Julie Wilson

Photo credits: 89studio ()

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Highlights, can you help?

very year, tens of thousands of children write to Highlights magazine, sharing their hopes and dreams, worries and concerns, as if they were writing to a trusted friend. From the beginning, Highlights has answered every child individuallyreassuring them that their feelings are real and what they think matters.

Longtime editor in chief Christine French Cully has curated a collection of this remarkable correspondenceletters, emails, drawings, poemsrevealing an intimate and inspiring 75-year conversation between Americas children and its leading childrens magazine. From the timeless, everyday concerns of friendship, family, and school, to the deeper issues of identity, sexuality, divorce, and grief, here is a unique time capsule of childhood in the voicesand the very handwritingof children themselves. Some of the most significant events are captured from a childs-eye view: the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Challenger Disaster, 9/11, the COVID-19 pandemic, and more.

Cullys insightful narrative encourages adults to lean in and listen to children. Now is the time to ensure that our kids feel heard and to help them understand they can become people who change the world.

Foreword

DVICE COLUMNISTS OCCUPY A STRANGE AND RARIFIED space in the world of words; unlike therapists or physicians, we operate more or less as trusted best friends or honorary aunties and uncles to the people who write to us for advice. Our most important gift is to gain, and retain, insightand to pass it along. We are amateurs, armed mainly with a way with words, a knack for paying close attention, and the ability to disseminate wisdom, along with our capacity to care about people we dont know personallyand will never meet. In fact, the only thing we really know about the people who write to us is that they have the courage to ask, along with a desire to be heard and understood.

Once upon a time, we were all children. Understanding, compassion, and respect are paramountespecially when responding to questions from children. No column has ever done this better than Dear Highlights, the long-running column in beloved Highlights magazine.

The spectrum of questions tackled by the magazine since its founding in 1946 spans what I see as the North and South Poles of human experience: Love and Loss. And because these questions are being asked by brave and curious children, the questions themselves are simple, beautiful, honest, and without the artifice, manipulative sheen, or flat-out ego that I so often see in queries sent to my own Ask Amy advice column, which is geared toward adults. (The gift of authenticity that comes along with childhood is too often lost with the passage of time.)

To read questions sent by children over the decades expressing concern over so many terrifying eventsfrom assassinations of national leaders, to terrorist bombings, natural disasters, police brutality, and to the coronavirus pandemicis a reminder of how traumatic and overwhelming these events can be for children, and how important it is that adults respond honestly and with great care.

To read questions about the quotidian concerns of childhoodhow to manage siblings, schoolyard bullies, parents, friendships, or how to convince their folks to get them a petis to absorb the beautiful universality of our more common experiences.

We have so much to learn from these kids. The thoughtful editors of Dear Highlights know this, because the answers to these thousands of queries always illuminate the legitimacy of the question, as well as provide such supportive, compassionate, and timeless advice!

What I didnt know before reading this book was that the editors of Highlights magazine respond to every single query sent to themnot just those that are published. I can guarantee that the tens of thousands of children who have received a personal reply over the decades have treasured this very special correspondence. This legacy of caring cannot be measured; it can only be felt.

As the mother and stepmother to five daughters, every single page of this treasured collection moves me profoundly. But what brings me to tears, again and again, are the facsimiles of the letters themselves, the handwritten poems on notebook paper, and the lovely illustrations sent in by childrenwho painstakingly express their hopes, dreams, fears, stresses, and triumphs to the wise and wonderful team behind Dear Highlights. What a joy to see this authentic and creative work shared on the page!

To read these questions and answerssome from many years agomakes one yearn to know how things turned out for the children who so bravely told their stories and asked their questions to the magazine. Read this opening sentence from the year 2000, written by a twelve-year-old girl named Lara, whose relationship with her mother was brutal: I am writing on behalf of my feelings, which are buried so deep inside of me Did the compassionate response to Laras plea make her feel heard and realize that she is deserving of love? (AndI cant help wondering: Did Jakeage 9ever stop cussing?)