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

A unique, inside look at American childhood through the conversations between Highlights magazine and its young readers and a call to grown-ups to make time to actively listen to the children in their lives.

Every 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, the editors at Highlights have answered every child individually. Longtime editor in chief Christine French Cully has curated a collection of this remarkable correspondence (letters, emails, drawings, and poems) in Dear Highlights—revealing an intimate and inspiring 75-year conversation between America’s children and its leading children’s 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 American childhood in the voices—and the very handwriting—of children themselves. The book captures a child's-eye view of some of the most important events of the past 75 years: the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Challenger Disaster, 9/11, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Cully’s insightful narrative becomes a call to action for adults to lean in and listen to children, to make sure our kids know that they matter and what they think matters, and to assure them that they have the power to become people who change the world.

By turns funny, heartbreaking, moving, and enlightening, Dear Highlights will cause readers to reflect, to listen, and to embrace the children in their lives.

From the foreword by nationally syndicated columnist Amy Dickinson:

“In times of great stress or trouble, Mr. Rogers advised children: ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ That’s exactly what children writing to ‘Dear Highlights’ find when they put pen to paper: helpers whose open-minded trust and kindness surely has made our world a better place.”