My 10 year-old recently had to write an essay for an application for a national scholarship program. He did great, writing 450ish words that were readable, thoughtful, and fun, with pleasantly varying sentences. And then we started editing.

I remember feeling like giving up in my early editing experiences, out of sorrow for the perfect first-draft gems being cut and out of bitterness at (generally) my Mom for having the temerity to suggest changes; if my essay wasn’t good enough then she was welcome to write a different one. My kiddo handled it better than I remember dealing with early editing experiences, by thinking through changes with my spouse without losing confidence in his work. But seeing his reactions and remembering my own made me think about how hard it is to get used to editing your writing.

For a kid, and especially one who tends to have an easy time with homework, it’s annoying to have an assignment that feels complete magically turn back into an interminable work in progress as the editing drags on. But that’s the least of editing’s problems! If the first draft was good, then why edit it all—isn’t the fact of the edits an indication that the original was poor work? How can a piece of writing still be mine if I’m incorporating suggestions from other people? Editing for structure and meaning is especially awful, like slowly waking up and realizing that the clarity you were so certain you’d found was just a dream after all.

I’ve seen my kids edit their work in other contexts: reworking lego creations, touching up drawings, or collaboratively improving Minecraft worlds. So maybe there’s something specific to editing writing that’s more challenging—communication is very personal after all. Or perhaps the homework context is the problem—it is a low-intrinsic-motivation setting. Maybe I just think editing is hard because my kid and I were both pretty good at writing, and some combination of genetics and parenting led to us both having a hard time with even the most gently constructive of criticism. There’s certainly some perfectionism being passed down through the generations in one way or another.

My other child is five years old and is, if anything, even more fiercely protective of her creative work. I want to make this better for her, to get her used to working with other people to evaluate and improve something she has made. But how do you do that as a parent? Should I just start pointing out flaws in my kindergartener’s craft projects? (No, I obviously should not.)

Maybe what’s really changing as kids hit their pre teen years is that creative work must increasingly achieve goals that can be evaluated but not measured. Editing starts out as fixing spelling or targeting a word count, but those are comparatively simple tasks. Does your essay convey what you wanted it to? Is it enjoyable to read? Does your drawing represent your subject or a given style as you intended? I would guess that such aims of editing tend to be implicit for highly-educated parents with strong written communication skills, and not at all obvious to an elementary school student. I’m not sure how much groundwork can be laid for these questions in kindergarten, but the next time I’m editing something with one of my kids, I think I’ll try explicitly introducing those goals before getting out the red pen.