It’s surprising to me just how often this fact is overlooked by budding magicians. If you are serious about making even a part-time career in magic, then working for kids is the best place to start. There’s no room for snobbishness. Let me convince you why this is your best option. There may be a few things here you hadn’t considered.

Firstly, outside Vegas, magic for kids is the biggest market with the highest turnover and it is a market that is being constantly renewed with an eager, insatiable public. In the US there is a child born every 7 seconds. That’s about 11,000 a day or 400,000 a year! It really is an ever expanding market. Consequently, demand is high and competition is low. So for the beginner wanting to go professional, the children’s magic show market is the easiest and most profitable to get started.

Another reason why you should do magic for kids is that you can use tried and tested routines that many world-weary adults would consider somewhat clichéd or even too simple to fascinate: the children are very open to being drawn into your magic world of fantasy, wonder and surprise and you can almost guarantee that they won’t have seen any of your routines before. This gives you a great opportunity to learn your fundamental performance skills, rapport building and misdirection without having to over challenge yourself on the technical side.

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And to balance that, children are in another way (a good way for you if you want to really get your skills razor-sharp) the most honest and rigorous critics you’ll ever have. In an adult show if the audience aren’t really into what you are doing, they’ll mostly not say so. They’ll sit politely through to the end and then send you away with a polite, but brief applause. Kids will just get up and start playing, go away, shout things out to you, whatever they feel like. That’s good because it means you have to be constantly alert, focussed, present and sensitive to the mood of your audience. Learning how to keep the kids there with you, glued to your every move and hanging on your every word, will teach you your finest skills; skills that you can carry with you from the community centre to Vegas and beyond, if that is your wish.

You see, trying to make a start in clubs, restaurants and theaters is to try to jump too far too soon for most. Practicing your magic tricks is really only a third of the game. The rest, the business and performance of a show, you can only really learn through experience.

Doing magic for kids will give you loads of scope to power up your performance, learn how to handle hecklers, develop a fascinating on-stage persona, and be flexible and responsive.

Add to that the fact that you stand a much better chance of getting paid sooner and I think you’ll see why so many of the world’s finest magicians actually started out this way.

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