There is a fast, tempting way to make a child's manuscript look polished. You smooth every sentence until it reads like an adult wrote it. We refuse to do that, and it is probably the most important decision we make.
The difference between editing and rewriting
Editing fixes what gets in the way of the story. Spelling, a confusing sentence, a plot hole, a scene that drags. All of that we do, properly, the way any publisher would.
Rewriting replaces the writer. It takes a 9-year-old's odd, perfect phrase and swaps it for the safe adult version. The book gets smoother and loses the only thing that made it worth publishing.
Edit the grammar. Never edit the voice.
A real example of the temptation
When Vedika Aggarwal built an ocean society run as a kind of hierarchical anarchy, with a small, dismissed wave at the centre, an editor trying to be helpful could have flattened that into something more familiar and less strange. The strangeness was the point. We left it.
When a young writer layers a story so that each chapter changes flavour, like Ashvik Bansal does, the neat instinct is to make it more uniform. We do not. Uniform is not better. It is just more adult.
What this asks of our editors
Holding this line is harder than rewriting. It means asking the child what they meant instead of assuming. It means defending a sentence that breaks a rule because it is doing real work. It means a mentor's job is to protect the voice, not to overwrite it.
The reward is a bookshelf full of titles that could only have been written by the specific child who wrote them. That is the entire product. A book that sounds like a committee made it is not worth a young author's name on the cover.