Hi, I see both these words meaning children and wonder what the difference is.
The only thing I seem to notice is that filhos appears to imply the parent/child relationship between people, so does it mean “offspring”, whereas crianças is just children in general?
@Jeremy - You’re correct. “Filhos” are the children of particular parents (or offspring, when talking about a somewhat deeper tree of descendants) whereas “crianças” is used to describe young children generally (see also, “menino” and “miudo” - though this last one is more of a slang term, akin to “kid” in English).
Thanks @pmfrancisco, that all makes sense.
The trap not to fall into for English speakers is blindly translating filhos as sons and ignoring the fact that there could be some daughters in there as well!