Having children has certainly been a big help in understanding the way that younger people think. I spend a lot of time reading with them, and seeing what engages them in other books. This has been an excellent help to me in my writing.
So far, I haven’t taken any of their specific ideas–but they’re still a little young. They do offer suggestions, but they tend to be things like, “You need a big orange dinosaur that builds itself a robot suit to fight ninjas.”
On second thought, that’s a pretty cool idea, isn’t it?