Why I Write for Children

When I write for children, I am not trying to teach.
I am trying to listen.

I write in conversation with my inner child — and with many imaginary children who live somewhere between curiosity and courage. Children who ask questions without shame. Children who feel deeply without needing permission. Children who know, instinctively, that not everything needs an answer to be worth exploring.

I don’t want books that explain the world to children.
I want books that remind them they are allowed to explore it.

I believe childhood is not something to be rushed through or corrected.
It is something to be protected.
And at the same time, it is something adults need to recover.

Children are open.
They are playful.
They are thinking all the time — even when we underestimate how much.

That’s why I never write down to them.
I trust their intelligence, their sensitivity, their capacity to wonder.
To underestimate a child is to shrink the world you offer them.

The Girl Who Listened to Houses

This book lives very close to my heart.

I believe The Girl can be the beginning of a child’s therapeutic life — not through answers, but through philosophy. Through questions. Through recognition.

When a child reads about feelings they recognize but can’t yet name, something opens.
They realize they are not strange.
They realize confusion is part of being alive.
They realize asking for help is also a form of strength.

The Girl doesn’t resolve emotions.
She sits with them.

And maybe that’s why adults find themselves in her too.

Adults abandon themselves so easily.
They lose connection with their inner life, their curiosity, their emotional language.

Through this book, I gently poke at that inner child — not to wake her up abruptly, but to remind her she is still there.

Dear Dictionary, We Need to Talk

Language has always been my playground.

Dear Dictionary was born from my fascination with words — and with the fact that they don’t always behave. That meaning is not fixed. That understanding is often negotiated.

This book isn’t about knowing the right word.
It’s about listening to words.
Playing with them.
Feeling how they land.

It invites children to trust their relationship with language, not obey it blindly.

Onomat… O Quê? and the Freedom of Sound

Sometimes words fail us.
And when they do, sound saves us.

I have always loved onomatopoeias. I replace words with sounds. I speak with gestures. I say tchuf tchuf and let my hands finish the sentence.

Onomat… O Quê? exists to show that when words are missing, we don’t need to fall silent.
We can play.

Peia, the centipede, teaches that sound is also language. That communication doesn’t require mastery — only curiosity and courage.

A Menina Tagarela

Tagarela (chit-chat girl) is me.

She is an embrace to every child who talks too much, thinks too fast, feels too intensely.
She is a love letter to creative energy that doesn’t know how to sit still.

But she also knows something important:
there is silence between words.
And there is room for both.

Not excess versus absence — but rhythm.

What I Hope Stays

When a child closes one of my books, I don’t hope they learned something.

I hope they felt loved.
Held.
Curious.

I hope they want to open another book.
And another.
And another.

I hope they feel inspired — in every possible way.

Because writing for children, for me, is about offering freedom.
Through sound.
Through words.
Through feelings.

And trusting that children — and the adults they will become — already know how to use it.