Behind the Scenes: Kids Takeover Issue with Highlights Magazine Editor Judy Burke

As you can imagine, Judy Burke keeps pretty busy as the editor of Highlights magazine. But once a year, Judy’s job looks a little different. Instead of working with adult authors on most of the magazine content, Judy and her team seek kids’ ideas, creations, and advice to inspire many of the magazine pages—all as part of the annual Highlights Kid Takeover issue!

So how in the world did this happen—devoting an entire issue of Highlights magazine to celebrating kids and featuring their amazing work and ideas? We talked with Judy to learn more about the origins of Kid Takeover!

How did you decide on the Kid Takeover theme?

When we’re brainstorming themes, we’re always thinking about, “What will kids love? What will they be intrigued by? What will they see and say ‘YES!’?” We’re always thinking about that mailbox moment, and I was thinking about all the great things that kids share with us. And I thought, “What if we just let them take over the entire issue? What if most of the things in that issue were sent by or inspired by real kids who have sent stuff to us? I think our readers would love that.” And that’s how it came about.

Empowering kids, letting them shine and helping them feel proud to be who they are is exactly our goal with every single thing we do here.

How do kids get to interact with this issue?

We wanted the whole issue to be really interactive. It starts with the cover, where we show a kid holding a blank frame and it says, “Draw yourself here.” And then, if kids want to, they can share their cover art with us at HighlightsKids.com. Once they get into the issue, kids will find puzzle ideas sent by kids, and Goofus and Gallant ideas sent by kids. The Dear Highlights page is all advice from kids this month. We usually feature some advice from kids, but this was a kid takeover of Dear Highlights. One cool thing is the “Create” spread — which is the two pages that usually feature kids’ drawings, poems, photos and short stories — leaves space for the reader to write their own poem or story and to draw their own picture right on the page, which is super cool and something we’ve never done before. 

What have you learned from last year’s Kid Takeover issue?

We got a great response from kids last year, which really was one of the main reasons we decided to do it again. Kids shared lots of comments that they loved designing the monster’s t-shirt on the cover — that was what we did last year. My absolute favorite comment was the one we published on this year’s Hello Friends page. An 11-year-old said to us, “I think it’s great that you made the magazine using so many kids’ ideas. You made a lot of kids feel proud to be who they are.” Empowering kids, letting them shine and helping them feel proud to be who they are is exactly our goal with every single thing we do here. So, it felt really good to hear that come back to us in a child’s own words. 

Judy is the editor of Highlights magazine. She works with a talented team to serve up fun and engaging content to kids each month. Over the years, she has also served as the editor of HighlightsKids.com, edited books and digital products, developed content with licensing and international partners, spoken at writers’ workshops and conferences, and — best of all! — responded to thousands of letters and emails from kids.

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