I am working on a mod involving adding a bunch of NPCs to the game. There are a couple child characters, but I want to make it so that the mod does not really on any other mods to work so I don't want to use COM data for this one. There is one folder of Bookart but I want the rest of the mod to be made with pure ingame stuff. Expansions are valid, some of the NPC's are creature characters and I needed some of the Bloodmoon creatures.

Besides creating a new race for every child character, I'm not sure there is a way to change the height of a specific character. What you would do is unpack the bosmer body parts from your MW .bsa, proceed to rename them, say, child_x, create all the body parts in the construction set, and finally scale the character down through the Character/Race menu.

Or, you scale the body parts down individually in Nifskope, once you've renamed the unpacked parts from your .bsa. This lets you visually inspect the size of the parts, and may save you several trips to the cs.

Hope that helps. My knowledge of modding's rudimentary, so maybe there's a better method.

I've tested one thing - you can write script for npc which set it's scale. I wasn't sure if it works for npcs but after testing, it does.

begin scriptname

short doOnce

if ( doOnce == 0 )
	SetScale 0.50 ;scale 0.5 is imho too small, but it was test anyway
	set doOnce to 1
endif

end

With this one attached to NPC you won't need to create new race. Note, you probably will need some more childish looking faces, because, you know... vanila ones look too mature.