Once upon a time, children's books needed an editor to help create the next generation's favorite stories. Though times have changed, children's literature still uses editors to help create riveting tales that not only inspire children, but teach them lessons that last a lifetime.

Children’s content editing involves the editing of various forms of children’s literature. These forms include board books, picture books, leveled readers, chapter books, middle grade, and young adult. These forms are aimed at different age ranges and they all have their own individual editing rules.

Children’s content editing is different from an editor working on children’s work. A children’s content editor’s sole focus is on editing children’s literature. It is up to the editor to understand the various rules of children’s literature to produce the most successful products for the market. The editor works with the author to edit not only the written words, but also the images and illustrations.

The main goal of the children’s content editor is to ensure that the children’s stories being published are going to hit the market successfully in terms of entertainment, but they also have to focus on what is age appropriate for a given work in the market. With young adult literature, the editor and author have more freedom to write on controversial topics or delve into deeper questions about life, whereas younger children’s books focus more on the moral lessons children need to become critical thinkers. A more challenging aspect of the children's content editor's job is their efforts to make sure the literature teaches children lessons, without being considered didactic in nature. They want to focus on maintaining lessons, without overdoing it.

The children’s editor has an extremely complex job as they must know a great deal about not only the editing side of publishing, but they also have to be aware of social issues and child developmental stages. To make the best-informed decision toward the publishing of a novel, the children’s content editor has to look at the publishing market in terms of what children are gravitating toward, as well as what lessons they need to learn as they grow.

Children’s editing may sometimes appear on job applications as youth editing, but both focus on editing novels for children. The pay is similar to that of a standard fiction editor earning roughly $51,000 as according to PayScale.