Not only am I a DM for my adult friends, I'm also a dad-DM for my young kids (5 and 7). I've started them through the same campaign as the grown-ups, but simplified and cleaned up to be more rated G to PG. This is making me simplify everything which forces me to commit the essentials to memory. We'll see how it goes, but 1 session in it's working.
D&D 5E Enhancing "Princes of the Apocalypse" (Practical stuff to try at your table!)
I'd be interested to know what specific substitutions you make.
I could write a very long post about details, but the main difference is that it is much more narrative, and much less rules heavy. Even the rules themselves, like character stats, are very simplified. As to the campaign, the biggest changes are the lethality and intention of bad guys. The bandits, for example, are just trying to steal people's stuff, and their murdering etc goes unsaid. My kids were still very motivated to rescue the bear, and stop the bandits.
The biggest thematic change, other than lethality and less cruelty, is that there is more moral clarity over who is good or bad. Nuance can be taught later, but at this age, "surprising" them with a town-council member being an evil cultist can be both confusing and unnecessarily upsetting. I'll do that to my regular players all the time, and even they can get annoyed if I didn't include proper foreshadowing that they could realize at least in retrospect.
I found (thanks to this thread) an archived Reddit post with suggestions on how to transition from Lost Mine of Phandelver into PotA. I cut and pasted the text of the post and comments into a Word document, which is attached here.
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Found some fan-created maps for this adventure that can be useful for virtual tabletops:
https://imgur.com/a/u2EmF
http://i.imgur.com/dXty3jL.jpg
https://imgur.com/a/FMuLU
https://imgur.com/a/u2EmF
http://i.imgur.com/dXty3jL.jpg
https://imgur.com/a/FMuLU
