Letters to children, to be opened much later

The sealed letter for a future birthday is a lovely idea that often goes wrong.

The common failure is writing to an imagined adult rather than from a real present. The letter becomes a list of hopes and instructions, and the child who eventually reads it meets a stranger issuing directions. What they actually want is the opposite: proof of the world they were too young to remember. Write about now. What they say at breakfast, the word they get wrong, what the kitchen looks like, what you were like at that age of your own life.

Avoid conditions attached to the future. A letter that tells a grown person who to be, or what will have disappointed you, arrives with a weight they did not agree to carry. Say what you noticed and what you loved, and leave the rest of their life to them. It is also worth writing more than one, at intervals, rather than a single grand letter, since a sequence shows change and a single letter can only pose.

Then handle the practicalities plainly, because sealed letters go missing more often than anyone admits. Say on the outside who it is for and when it is meant to be opened. Tell one other adult where it is. A letter nobody can find is a letter nobody wrote.