Greg Soros on Opening Windows Into Other Lives

A picture book cannot travel, but according to children’s author Greg Soros, it can still take a child somewhere they have never been. Soros calls this the window half of his writing philosophy, the belief that stories should carry young readers past their own front door and into someone else’s experience entirely.

Stepping Into Someone Else’s Story

Soros puts it plainly: “Children’s books should open their minds to different perspectives and experiences.” For him, that means a farm kid meets a story set in a crowded city, or a reader with no disability follows a character who navigates the world differently. The goal is not novelty for its own sake but a genuine widening of what a child understands to be normal.

Greg Soros outlined a structured approach to designing children’s characters in an interview with TheFutureofThings, emphasizing observation, testing, and iterative refinement. He is specific about the mechanics of empathy building through fiction. “When a child reads about someone from a different culture, someone with different abilities, or someone facing challenges they’ve never encountered, it expands their understanding of what it means to be human,” Soros says. Greg Soros treats that expansion as measurable progress, not an abstract goal, and he tracks it through conversations with teachers and parents after a book reaches shelves.

Research Behind the Windows

None of this happens by guesswork. Greg Soros spends time in classrooms, consults child development specialists, and brings in sensitivity readers so that the windows he builds reflect real experiences rather than assumptions about them. That process, rooted in his background in child development and educational psychology, shapes the research phase of nearly every project he takes on.

Soros has spent more than sixteen years refining this approach, and he does not treat the window and the mirror as separate tools. A single book, he argues, can open a view into someone else’s world for one child while reflecting that same child’s life back to another reader entirely. Through his ongoing writing projects, Greg Soros continues pushing that dual purpose forward, betting that a child who reads widely enough will grow into an adult who understands more people than they otherwise would have. See related link for additional information.

 

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