Something Very Sad Happened: A Toddler’s Guide to Understanding Death: A picture book about death and grief for toddlers (age 2+)

Each week, we recommend one kids book that teaches a mental health concept. Today, we’re sharing a book that tackles talking about death: Something Very Sad Happened: A Toddler’s Guide to Understanding Death, written by Bonnie Zucker and illustrated by Kim Fleming. This book highlights the concept of talking about tough topics — the idea that giving kids straightforward, truthful, and age-appropriate explanations about difficult topics, like death. Read on to learn why we recommend Something Very Sad Happened to the parents we know, the science behind having hard conversations, and tips for talking to your kiddo about death.

About the Book
Something Very Sad Happened: A Toddler’s Guide to Understanding Death follows a little boy whose grandma just died. The book explains death in age-appropriate language — when someone dies, their body stops working — and uses child-friendly metaphors (“like when your toy stops working”). The book also talks about the different emotions people can feel when someone they love dies, like feeling sad, scared, or mad. This book also includes recommendations for parents and caregivers on answering kids' questions about death. By talking about death in straightforward and simple language, Something Very Sad Happened exemplifies how experts recommend having honest and developmentally appropriate conversations with kids about death.

Buy Something Very Sad Happened or listen online for free

What Science Tells Us about Talking to Kids About Death

Wondering about death is a normal and healthy part of childhood. Researchers have identified that children begin asking questions about death as early as age 3, and their questions typically focus on the biological aspects of death, like “what happens to people when they die?”. It also seems that when kids learn about the body and the biology of life, it helps them understand death. In one study, 60 preschoolers (between 3 and 6) were randomized to receive either a training about different body parts and how the body works to support life, or no training. They were interviewed about the human body and their understanding of death before and after the training. Children who received the training understood death better than non-trained children (for example, they understood that death eventually happens to everyone, that death is permanent, and that when we die, our bodies stop working). The researchers concluded that when kids learned about how the body functions to support life, it helped them realize that death is caused by a breakdown in body functioning (even though they weren’t taught this explicitly).

Parents sometimes worry that giving kids straightforward and truthful information about death might make children fear death or feel anxious. In fact, the opposite might be true. In one study, nearly 100 children between the ages of 4 and 8 were interviewed about their understanding of death and their fear of death. Children with more “mature” understandings of death (understanding that when someone dies, their body stops working, and that eventually, everyone dies) actually had less anxiety about death than children who didn’t understand these things. Because this research is correlational (it didn’t test out different explanations of death and how they impact death-related anxiety), it doesn’t prove that straightforward explanations of death definitely reduce anxiety, but it’s a strong hint in that direction.

How can we talk to young kids about death? Experts recommend keeping these conversations simple, straightforward, and truthful. Use direct language like “Grandma got sick and her body stopped working. She went to the hospital where doctors and nurses helped her, but she died,” and avoid using expressions like “We lost Grandma,” “Grandma is asleep,” or “Grandma went home,” which may confuse toddlers or even make them fear regular activities like going home or falling asleep. Telling your child more information than they’re asking for can make them more upset or confused. Answer your child’s question directly and briefly, then pause and see if they have any more questions. You may be surprised by what their questions are and what information satisfies them!

What Marin likes about Something Very Sad Happened: While rituals for grief and remembrance can look very different across cultures & between families, I really value the practical, straightforward tips this book offers for helping kids maintain connections with the person who has died. For example, the mom suggests they can look at pictures of Grandma and tell stories about her as they “continue to love her.” Many grief books we reviewed talked about helping kids feel connected to the loved one who died, but Something Very Sad Happened stood out because it offers clear ideas about what this can actually look like, especially for toddlers.

What Betsy likes about Something Very Sad Happened: I really appreciate how Something Very Sad Happened talks about emotions kids’ parents might feel when someone they love dies, and shows the little boy’s mom crying. This normalizes tough emotions like sadness and anger and helps kids understand why their parents might be upset after someone dies. It also reminds me of our post about helping kids name others’ emotions, which discusses the importance of helping kids learn how one emotion might be expressed differently by different people.

Buy Something Very Sad Happened or listen online for free

We think Something Very Sad Happened would be a great addition to any child’s library. We’d love to hear your reactions to this review and your questions about talking to kids about death — we’ll highlight some answers in next week’s post. Reply to this email, or join our community to leave a comment!

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FYI: The links above for buying Something Very Sad Happened are affiliate links (see this page for more information).

Last week, we recommended Frannie the Food Explorer, which highlights the concept of food exposure — the idea that approaching avoided foods in a structured way (by exploring them with all five senses) can help kids overcome picky eating (read that post here). This week, we share some resources to try food exposure with your kiddo at home, and answer your real-life questions about picky eating.

Buy Frannie the Food Explorer or listen to Marin read it for free and see a demonstration of sensory food exposure on our new YouTube channel!

How to Try Out Food Exposure with Your Child
We want to make practicing food exposure using sensory exploration feel as approachable as possible. Here are some ideas of how you can encourage your child to have a “food explorer” mindset. We’ve included some comments to help you understand why we recommend these steps.

This is an example of an initial introduction of a disliked food. Note that we wouldn’t expect this single exposure will make the child suddenly start liking bell peppers. The parent will need to repeat the exposures (maybe even many times over many weeks) to decrease the child’s anxiety or discomfort about bell peppers. Parents can continue to build brave practices that vary the way the child is exposed to the disliked food (e.g., different temperatures, different colors of bell pepper, bell pepper cut or cooked in different ways ). We can also introduce the avoided food with preferred foods (e.g., serving the bell pepper on pizza, if the child likes pizza; served next to chicken nuggets, if the child likes chicken nuggets).

Questions From Our Community About Food Exposure

Q: After reading one of the books you recommended on anxiety, my son asked, “What happens when kids aren’t afraid of the dark, but they are afraid of eating pasta?” I realized that standing up to fears around certain foods can feel different from other kinds of “brave practices.” Do you have any tips for helping kids with picky eating or food-related anxiety?

A: We really appreciate this kiddo and parent’s insightful question! Facing eating fears can feel different than facing other fears for both the kiddo and the parents supporting them. The good news is that the same basic ideas are at play: avoiding the feared thing keeps fear going, and gentle, repeated practice of approaching the fear helps kids learn that they can handle scary or uncomfortable situations.

For more typical fears, like a fear of the dark, kids may worry that the feared thing is dangerous in some way (“if I turn out the lights, a monster will get me”). Through exposure, we help kids practice approaching the feared situation again and again so they can learn either that it is not as dangerous as they thought or that they can handle the discomfort that comes with it. Food exposure works in a very similar way, but often the scary part is more about sensations and body experiences than a specific fear of danger. A child may feel uncomfortable or unsettled by how a food looks, smells, feels, sounds, or tastes. In our experience, oftentimes kids can’t quite articulate what they’re afraid of with foods they fear or avoid, because the fear or discomfort is more rooted in sensory experiences (“It looks gross” or “it feels weird”) than beliefs about a bad thing happening.

Research on picky eating has shown that repeated exposures to new or non-preferred foods, including taste and texture exposures like the ones we talked about in our review of Frannie the Food Explorer, can help kids become more comfortable over time. This kind of multisensory, low-pressure exploration helps kids learn, “This is something I can handle.” For both food and non-food fears, we want to support kids in taking small, brave steps instead of rescuing them from all discomfort or asking them to jump right into the deep end if they aren’t ready:

• For fear of the dark, this might mean standing in a dim hallway, sitting in a dark room with a parent nearby, and then trying it alone for a few minutes.

• For unfamiliar or non-preferred foods, this might mean looking at a piece of pasta, smelling it, touching an uncooked noodle, then touching a cooked noodle, licking it, and eventually taking a tiny bite (and repeating this several times).

In both situations, the goal is to build the child’s confidence through repeated practice, with gradual steps that get a little harder over time. The goal of a brave practice is to help kids stay curious about the new experience, without pressure.

Go deeper on the science of picky eating and sensory exposure:

1. Want more info on picky eating? We love this tip sheet from Penn State Extension, and also this deep dive from Solid Starts!

2. We also love this article from Raising Children Network, which talks more about the importance of playing with food and messy eating, and gives parents some ideas on how to manage the mess.

3. For a deep dive on the benefits of messy eating, check out this Solid Starts article, which highlights how messy eating can minimize pickiness through encouraging exploration (read the section titled “getting messy supports sensory learning”!).

4. You might be noticing a trend here — Solid Starts has a TON of golden information about kids, eating, and pickiness in their article library. Topics include preventing picky eating, toddler eating FAQ, food throwing in babies and toddlers, and information on what to do if your baby won’t touch a food.

One important note: if a child is losing weight, eating very few foods, gagging or vomiting often, avoiding whole food groups, or becoming very distressed at meals, parents should reach out to a pediatrician or feeding specialist. More intense food fears may need specialized support, such as from a provider who specializes in ARFID. Check out our tips on finding evidence-based treatment for your kiddo.

Are you worried about picky eating? Have you tried adopting a “food explorer” mentality or doing sensory exposure? Share your experiences or questions about helping kids try new or avoided foods in the comments!

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FYI: The links above for buying Frannie the Food Explorer are affiliate links (see this page for more information).

Below we share Minds in Bloom’s resources on bodies and eating to help parents and caregivers create positive experiences around food (including exploring new or avoided foods) and support kids in developing a compassionate relationship with their own bodies.

Frannie the Food Explorer: A picture book about picky eating for kids (age 5+)

Each week, we recommend one kids book that teaches a mental health concept. Today, we’re sharing a book that tackles picky eating: Frannie the Food Explorer, written by Tifani Wilhelm and illustrated by Lacey Gatewood. This book highlights the concept of food exposure — the idea that approaching avoided foods in a structured way can help kids overcome picky eating. Read on to learn why we recommend Frannie the Food Explorer to the parents we know, the science behind food exposure, and tips for talking to your kiddo about picky eating.

About the Book
Frannie doesn’t like peas 🫛. Her family encourages her to “just try them,” but that just makes Frannie want to hide! It’s only when Frannie’s mom offers to help her explore the peas that she becomes willing to give it a go. Frannie’s mom coaches her through seeing, smelling, touching, licking, and finally, tasting the peas, highlighting what food exposure for picky eating can look like. By the end of the book, Frannie has tried a few peas and feels empowered to explore other foods.

Buy Frannie the Food Explorer or listen to Marin read it for free and see a demonstration of sensory food exposure on our new YouTube channel!

What Science Tells Us about Food Exposure
How can seeing, smelling, and touching disliked foods help kids become less picky? Kids who struggle with picky eating often have greater sensory sensitivity and may avoid foods that produce unfamiliar or uncomfortable sensations, like the jellylike seedy inside of a tomato or the dense fluffiness of mashed potatoes. Clinicians often find that these kids stick to foods with familiar appearances and textures (like eating all white foods). Exposure — a skill we’ve written about before that is used to help people approach feared situations — can help kids (and adults) become more comfortable with these sensations. Cognitive behavioral treatment (CBT) for clinically picky eating uses “sensory exposure” to help kids gradually explore the different sensory properties of a new food. When doing sensory exposure in CBT, kids are encouraged to explore the foods using all five senses, as Frannie demonstrates:

1. By sight

2. By touch

3. By smell

4. By taste (by taking a bite, which can be tiny — like the size of a grain of rice)

5. By texture (by taking a second bite).

Notice that only the last two steps involve putting the food in your mouth! Whenever this exploration is attempted, parents should use their specific praise skills to enthusiastically celebrate any attempts at eating, even if the bite isn’t swallowed but is only placed in the kid’s mouth or chewed. (You may notice this list is slightly different from Frannie’s mom’s order — in both cases, the goal is to learn about the food, not necessarily to like the food).

To help prevent future eating problems among kids just starting solids or kids who don’t have problems with picky eating, parents can encourage a “food explorer” mentality — putting new foods in front of their child and letting them explore it freely. This leverages your child’s natural curiosity to explore different sensations. For talking kiddos, parents can ask questions like: “What colors and shapes do you notice?” and “Does it smell salty or sweet?” to encourage sensory exploration. Help model neutral language for your kiddo, rather than descriptions that are positive (“that looks delicious”) or negative (“that looks disgusting!”). For pre-talking kids or babies, parents can practice putting a food item in front of the child and letting them do what they want with it. It’s okay if the child doesn’t eat it — they might explore the food’s textures by smashing their hands in it or smearing it on the table. Sensory exploration often involves play!

For kids with pickiness that is causing problems, a more structured approach might be needed. This could look like building a list of foods your child avoids, and using rewards to help motivate them to gradually explore each one using the 5 steps above. In CBT for clinically picky eating, therapists work with kids to complete each sensory exposure step repeatedly for each food they avoid. Researchers note that 10-15 attempts with the unfamiliar or disliked food might be needed. Exposure works: In one study, parents either gave their child a small taste of a vegetable they disliked every day for two weeks (exposure condition) or received educational materials about nutrition (control condition). At the end of the two weeks, children in the exposure condition both liked and consumed more of the vegetable.

What Marin likes about Frannie the Food Explorer: I love how Frannie’s parents incorporate play into their food-exploration process, like encouraging Frannie to roll the peas, smash peas, and make a game of bouncing them down her arms, her cheeks, and eventually her lips! Frannie’s mom clearly says that this type of play isn’t rude; instead, this food play helps kids’ brains understand that new foods aren’t threatening and allows them to learn more about the food's textures in an approachable way. As Frannie’s mom says, playing with a feared food is a HUGE win and shouldn’t be underestimated when building willingness to try novel foods!

What Betsy likes about Frannie the Food Explorer: I like how Frannie’s mom talks about negative thoughts about food. She says: “your brain might say ‘Ew, those green peas look so strange.’” This way of discussing thoughts — they’re things our brains say, and they’re not necessarily true — can help make thoughts less sticky.

Something we don’t love about Frannie: Some of the language Frannie’s mom uses isn’t how we recommend talking about exposure. For example, she refers to the steps of food exposure as “easy” and “not hard” and says to Frannie, “there’s no need to cry!” Exposure isn’t easy — it’s hard work! Telling a kid otherwise can be invalidating and actually make them less motivated to put in the effort. Instead, we recommend that parents name their child’s emotions and use reflective listening while doing food exposures.

Buy Frannie the Food Explorer or listen to Marin read it for free and see a demonstration of sensory food exposure on our new YouTube channel!

We think Frannie the Food Explorer would be a great addition to any child’s library. We’d love to hear your reactions to this review and your questions about picky eating — we’ll highlight some answers in next week’s post. Reply to this email, or join our community to leave a comment!

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FYI: The links above for buying Frannie the Food Explorer are affiliate links (see this page for more information).

Building emotional intelligence takes practice, and parents play a huge role by modeling skills like reflective listening, flexible thinking, and self-compassion. We’ve gathered Minds in Bloom resources on the ABCs of emotion — core skills that help kids (and caregivers!) navigate feelings, solve problems, and build resilience from the ground up.

Last post, we recommended When Sadness is at Your Door, which highlights the concept of externalizing emotions — the idea that talking about sadness (and other hard feelings) as being separate from ourselves can give them less control over our thoughts and actions (read that post here). This week, we share some resources to help you coach your kid to externalize emotions at home, and answer your real-life questions about helping kids see their emotions as separate from themselves.

Buy When Sadness is at Your Door or listen online for free

How to Talk About Externalizing Sadness with Your Child
We want to make practicing externalizing hard emotions as approachable as possible. Here are some ideas of how you can talk to your child about externalizing sadness. We’ve included some comments to help you understand why we recommend these steps.

Questions From Our Community About Externalizing Emotions

Q: At what age should I start thinking about teaching my kiddo to externalize their emotions?

A: This is a great question! There isn’t really one particular age at which kids are ready or not to start practicing externalizing emotions. Instead, this skill builds on a series of other foundational emotion skills, some of which we’ve talked about in our earlier posts, like:

• Naming basic emotions

• Noticing feelings in our bodies

• Being able to understand that emotions change over time (like when using our feeling thermometer to notice how an emotion can be big sometimes and small at other times)

• Using emotion regulation or coping skills (like belly breathing) to change the intensity of what we feel

For a young person, building a foundation of these basic emotion skills might look like:

• Feeling confident naming their emotions, even if it’s with a grown-up’s help

• Being able to recognize and name emotions in other people or characters (like noticing them talking about a character in a book that’s sad or angry)

• Being able to notice specific body cues that might help them to understand that they’re feeling a certain emotion, like “I cry, and my heart squeezes when I’m sad.”

When a kid is showing these more basic emotion skills (e.g., recognizing how emotions affect their body and naming those emotions), that’s probably a great time to introduce the idea that emotions can be externalized. Often, this happens around the preschool years, but it may start earlier for some kids or later for others. You might try saying something like, “It looks like the anger monster is getting really loud,” when you notice your child is feeling angry, and see how they respond to that cue. If it feels confusing, upsetting, or they take it very literally, you can take a step back and continue practicing basic emotion skills of noticing and naming emotions first. The goal isn’t for the kiddo to grasp the idea at a really high level right away, but to gradually understand that emotions are something they experience, not their identity. We like to say “I am the sky, my emotions are the weather”.

Go deeper on the science of externalizing emotions:

1. This 10-step guide on taming the worry monster has some great ideas for helping kids externalize worries and fears. It’s written by a psychologist (Daniel Peters, PhD).

2. We also like this longer guide on externalizing worry, written for parents of kids 5+!

3. We love this blog post from a Beck Institute therapist, who talks about using externalizing emotions during CBT with a 9-year-old!

Do you notice your child identifying with their emotions? Have you tried helping them externalize difficult emotions? Share your experiences or questions about externalizing sadness and other hard feelings in the comment!

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FYI: The links above for buying When Sadness is at Your Door are affiliate links (see this page for more information).

When Sadness is at Your Door: A picture book about externalizing sadness for preschoolers (age 3+)

Each week, we recommend one kids book that teaches a mental health concept. Today, we’re sharing a book that tackles sadness: When Sadness is at Your Door, written and illustrated by Eva Eland. This book highlights the concept of externalizing emotions — the idea that talking about sadness (and other hard feelings) as being separate from yourself can help them have less control over your thoughts and actions. Read on to learn why we recommend When Sadness is at Your Door to the parents we know, the science behind externalizing emotions, and tips for talking to your kiddo about their hard feelings.

About the Book
In When Sadness is at Your Door (published in the UK as When Sadness Comes to Call), Sadness, appearing as a large, green, transparent figure, arrives unexpectedly and begins following a child around. The child tries to push Sadness away, but it doesn’t work. Only when the child gives Sadness a name and starts going about his life and doing regular activities with Sadness by his side do things get easier. As the story continues, Sadness grows smaller and smaller, until one morning, the child wakes up and Sadness is gone. By showing Sadness as separate from the child, this book demonstrates the skill of externalizing emotion, which involves talking about feelings as temporary visitors rather than parts of who we are.

Buy When Sadness is at Your Door or listen online for free

What Science Tells Us about Externalizing Sadness
Externalizing emotions involves talking about feelings in a very specific way — for example, encouraging children to give their emotion a name and a physical description. Therapists who use this technique will often ask kids questions like, “what do you want to name your sadness?” or “what does your worry look like?” Kids often enjoy coming up with a creative name for their externalized feeling. The goal is to get kids talking about their emotions — and the experience of having that emotion — as separate from themselves, which can sound like this:

• “My Anger Volcano is trying to erupt!”

• “Mr. Worry is telling me that I might mess up.”

• “The Squiggly Cloud of Doom is covering me and making everything look grey!”

• “The Anxiety Monster is trying to boss me around, telling me something bad is going to happen!”

(While monster-related names are common, Marin has worked with kids who want to call their anxiety “George.”)

Externalizing emotions is a skill used frequently by child therapists — for example, this study found it common during childhood OCD treatment. Why talk about emotions this way? Three reasons:

1. Externalizing emotions makes them feel less scary and reduces their disruptiveness

First, using language to indicate that emotions are separate from the child — rather than a part of the child — can help kids understand that they are not their feelings, symptoms, or experiences. When we view emotions and experiences as “temporary visitors” rather than as permanent parts of who we are, it can make it easier to remember that emotions are fleeting and temporary, not constant — they might be tough to experience, but they will go away eventually. This mindset can make it easier to continue to do the things we care about, like hobbies or spending time with friends, even while experiencing big emotions. This is closely linked to two ideas we’ve written about before — observing sadness (rather than fighting it) and doing mood-boosting activities.

2. Externalizing emotions sends the message that the child is not the problem

Second, externalizing emotions sends a very clear signal to the child that the emotion is an experience they are having, and that they are not bad for having this experience (many kids start to have their belief especially when their emotion is linked to disruptive behavior). Talking about emotions as separate from kids empowers kids and parents to work together as a team to address the feeling or symptom. Externalizing emotions helps kids think things like, “my parents and I can work together to deal with the Anger Volcano,” and can help parents think things like, “I want to support my child in pushing back against their Worry Monster.” Parent use of externalizing seems to be good for kids’ mental health — this study found that when parents used more externalizing talk doing exposure therapy for OCD, kids had fewer OCD symptoms at the end of treatment.

3. Externalizing emotions empowers kids to use skills for changing thoughts and behavior

Lastly, externalizing emotions can make it easier for kids to begin to notice and change their thoughts and behaviors. Asking questions like “What is Sadness telling you to do?” or “Is the Anxiety Monster saying any mean thoughts?” can prompt kids to talk about their thoughts with less shame. It can also make it easier for kids to notice connections between emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. For instance, saying something like “The Sadness Cloud is telling you that nobody wants to play with you. Hm… is that silly Cloud telling untrue stories again? Let’s go to the park and test out whether that story is true!” This article by childhood CBT expert Dr. Philip Kendall talks about how naming a character who is responsible for negative thoughts (like a “worry monster” or “guard dog”) can help kids develop more helpful and balanced thoughts.

What Marin likes about When Sadness is at Your Door: This book does an awesome job of showing how inviting our hard emotions in, rather than trying to push them away, can actually help them get smaller faster. The more we tell ourselves not to feel something, the bigger this feeling tends to get. The boy in this story is so gentle with his invitation as he opens the door to his sadness. It really reminded me of the compassion we can all feel for ourselves when big feelings show up. Feelings are what make us human after all, so why not show them kindness when they arrive?

What Betsy likes about When Sadness is at Your Door: I love how this book shows the child and Sadness doing activities like drawing, listening to music, and walking in the woods together. This connects to the idea of mood-boosting activities — doing activities we enjoy — or making a point to get active — even when we feel down. Parents can combine the idea of externalizing sadness with getting active by saying things like “I can tell Sadness is visiting you right now! What if we go to the toy store — silly Sadness is invited too! We can see how Sadness reacts.”

Buy When Sadness is at Your Door or listen online for free

We think When Sadness is at Your Door would be a great addition to any child’s library. We’d love to hear your reactions to this review and your questions about externalizing sadness — we’ll highlight some answers in future posts. Reply to this email, or join our community to leave a comment!

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FYI: The links above for buying When Sadness is at Your Door are affiliate links (see this page for more information).

Knowing how to support kids through moments of sadness or feeling “meh” can help keep these feelings from taking on a life of their own. We’ve gathered Minds in Bloom resources on sadness, anhedonia, and depression to help parents and caregivers nurture kids’ well-being.

The good news? Kids can learn to observe their worries without always thinking they’re true, and to face fears through exposure — small, brave steps that help kids “boss back” fear and anxiety. We’ve gathered Minds in Bloom resources on anxiety, worry, and fear to help parents and caregivers guide kids toward courage and confidence.

Last week, we recommended Little Faces Big Feelings, which highlights the concept of naming emotions in others — the idea that noticing and naming other people’s feelings helps kids build their emotional intelligence (read that post here). This week, we share some resources to help you practice noticing and naming emotions with your kiddo at home, and answer your real-life questions about expressing emotions around kids.

Buy Little Faces Big Feelings or preview most of the book here

How to Practice Naming Emotions with Your Child
We want to make talking about other people’s emotions feel as approachable as possible. Here are some ideas of how you can talk to your child about other people’s feelings. We’ve included some comments to help you understand why we recommend these steps.

This example shows how kids can sometimes misinterpret others’ emotions and why it can be helpful to practice noticing and naming others’ emotions with them. During these conversations, it’s also important to remember that the same emotion can look very different on two different people, so the more versions of emotional expression they are exposed to, the better they can recognize and empathize with others’ experiences.

Questions From Our Community About Naming Emotions

Q: I want to practice naming and expressing emotions in front of my child, but sometimes the situations that I feel strongly about are topics I wouldn’t normally discuss with my child (like my disagreements with my partner). Is it important to express my emotions in front of my child even in these moments, or can I be more selective about when I name my emotions in front of my child?

A: Thank you so much for asking such a specific question! The first thing we would recommend considering is: what is the purpose of sharing this emotion with your child?

If your child is noticing that you are having a strong feeling, or if the feeling is getting in the way of parenting the way you want to, that might be a moment to name it in a simple, honest, age-appropriate way (keep an eye out for a future post where we discuss talking with kids about hard topics in more detail 🌸). This does not mean going into all of the adult details or necessarily naming the other people involved. You might say something like, “You’re right, I am feeling frustrated. I had a tough conversation today, and I’m thinking more about it,” or “I’m feeling angry because I felt misunderstood earlier, but you did nothing wrong.”

The most important thing is that if your child is noticing your emotion, you want to help them make sense of what they are seeing. Sometimes, when kids can tell something is off, and we say, “No, I’m fine, everything’s fine,” that can be confusing for them or make them start to distrust their own judgment and emotional interpretation. But, this doesn’t mean you need to bring up every adult emotion just for the sake of teaching emotional expression. There will be plenty of natural moments where your child sees you have a strong feeling, name it, and cope with it.

One other important distinction is that modeling emotional expression is different from seeking emotional support from your child. It is okay to help them understand what they are witnessing, but we do not want them to feel responsible for comforting us, solving the problem, or carrying the adult emotion. Thank you for being such a thoughtful member of our community, and keep the great questions coming!

Go deeper on the science of naming emotions:

1. We love this article, which talks about how reading picture books can help kids develop their emotional vocabulary — speaking our language!

2. Here’s a fun emotion-naming activity from Sesame Street! (This is an online activity with real kids’ faces showing a TON of different emotions!)

3. Play emotion charades! Pick an emotion and ask your child to show the feeling with her face. You can trade off, practicing expressing emotions! Here are two video versions of a “name that emotion” game, one from Inside Out and one from Sesame Street.

4. Want to go deep into the scientific literature on how kids learn emotions? This article from Annual Review of Developmental Psychology argues that we should stop thinking about recognizing emotions — which implies that emotional cues are unambiguous — and start thinking about reasoning about emotions — making inferences and predictions about other people’s emotional states based on the information available.

5. You can also listen to this interview with Lisa Feldman Barrett, one of the world’s most famous emotion researchers, about how our brains make emotions from information inside and outside our bodies.

Do you notice your child noticing when other people feel sad or angry? Have you talked to your child about emotions you see in the wild? Share your experiences or questions about naming emotions in the comments!

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FYI: The links above for buying Little Faces, Big Feelings are affiliate links (see this page for more information).

Little Faces Big Feelings: A board book about naming others’ emotions for toddlers (age 1+)

Each week, we recommend one kids book that teaches a mental health concept. Today, we’re sharing a book that tackles feelings: Little Faces Big Feelings: What Emotions Look Like, by Amy Morrison. This book highlights the value of naming emotions in other people — the idea that noticing and naming other people’s feelings helps kids grow their emotional intelligence, laying the foundation for strong social relationships, cooperative behavior, and mental well-being. Read on to learn why we recommend Little Faces Big Feelings to the parents we know and the science behind the development of emotional awareness.

About the Book
Little Faces Big Feelings is an incredible board book with pictures of tons of kids experiencing real emotions! Each page highlights a different emotion — like happiness, fear, bravery, silliness, and surprise — and shows 100+ real kids experiencing these emotions. We love how this book highlights how a single emotion can look differently on different people’s faces. There’s also an emotion wheel and a mirror at the back of the book for you and your kiddo to practice making different emotion faces together!

Buy Little Faces Big Feelings or preview most of the book here

What Science Tells Us about Naming Others’ Emotions
A core part of emotional development is learning to make educated guesses about how other people are feeling, based on their facial expressions, body language, or tone of voice. As it turns out, this is an incredibly important life skill. Kids who have better abilities to figure out what other people are likely feeling do more prosocial behaviors like sharing and helping, are more liked by their peers and seen by their teachers as more socially skilled, and have less depression, anxiety, and disruptive behavior. These results are so strong that in research following kids over time, preschoolers with more emotion knowledge have more social skills when they reach kindergarten, and kindergarteners with more emotion knowledge have better social skills, more academic success, and fewer behavioral problems when they reach third grade.

Parents can help kids learn to notice and label other people’s emotions by making emotion talk as part of everyday family life, and by practicing linking emotions to situations and circumstances. You can do this by:

• Noticing how emotional expression varies within your family (“What does it look like when Mom is feeling sad? How do you know when your brother is sad?”)

• Talking about emotions you notice on other people when you’re in public, like a child crying at the park (“That baby looks sad. Maybe he is sad because he doesn’t want to leave the playground”).

• Pointing out and asking questions about how different characters might be feeling when reading books together (“The girl looks happy! Maybe she is happy because she got to dress up as a ladybug!”)

• Labeling your own emotions using non-judgmental language in front of your child (“I’m feeling frustrated because I can’t find my keys!”)

Researchers talk about something interesting about emotions — two people feeling happy might have two different facial expressions, and two people with the same facial expressions might be feeling two different emotions. There is not a universal way a face looks or moves when a person is experiencing an emotion. Books like Little Faces, which show many different people’s faces as they experience the same emotion, may be particularly helpful for conveying this idea.

Kids tend to gain the ability to recognize emotions in others in a specific order. A recent meta-analysis (a study which combines the results of other studies) showed that kids tend to have the easiest time recognizing happiness and the hardest time recognizing disgust and fear. Why does it go in that order? Recently, some very cool researchers used wearable cameras to record what toddlers see in everyday situations at home. They found that a) toddlers don’t see that many emotion faces in their daily lives (perhaps because toddlers are not at face level with members of their family), and b) the most common emotion toddlers see from family members is happiness - aw! The researchers think the frequency of exposure to happy faces may be why kids learn to recognize happiness first.

The fact that toddlers don’t naturally see a lot of emotional expressions in their daily lives hints that it could be helpful expose toddlers to examples of real emotions to help them learn about the wide range of emotions humans experience. There’s a good reason to think that photo books might be a good way to do this. Researchers have found that kids as young as 9 months old can learn about the world from looking at realistic pictures, and another study found that 15- to 24-month-olds were more likely to learn from highly realistic images like photos than from less realistic ones like cartoons. We also know that the “own-age” bias makes kids recognize other kids’ faces more accurately than adult faces. Taken together, this suggests that books with realistic photos of children showing a range of emotions - like Little Faces - may be an especially effective, convenient way to support kids’ emotional learning.

What Marin likes about Little Faces Big Feelings: I thought this book did a fantastic job of showing the diversity of ways a single emotion can be expressed. While it is fun to notice the similarities in how the ten photos capture expressions of silliness or boredom, it's equally educational to notice the subtle differences in how each kid conveys that emotion in their snapshot. This book (and all the books published by Little Feminists!) also does an amazing job of featuring kids with a wide diversity of ages, body types, skin colors, and abilities. The effort they made to represent so many different kids’ experiences of the world sparked a lot of joy and curiosity in me!

What Betsy likes about Little Faces Big Feelings: In addition to my love of all the cute kid photos, I also love the way Little Faces talks about emotions in a non-judgmental way: “Feeling scared is okay. No feeling is wrong” and “Mad or frustrated? Can you tell? Big emotions can make us yell.” This messaging reminds me of how we can notice emotions like sadness or anxiety without labeling them as wrong or bad.

Buy Little Faces Big Feelings or preview most of the book here

We think Little Faces Big Feelings would be a great addition to any child’s library. We’d love to hear your reactions to this review and your questions about naming others’ emotions— we’ll highlight some answers in future posts. Reply to this email, or join our community to leave a comment!

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FYI: The links above for buying Little Faces Big Feelings are affiliate links (see this page for more information).

Last week, we recommended The Magical Yet, which highlights the concept of balanced thinking — the idea that changing the way you think can change how you feel and act (read that post here). This week, we share some resources to try balanced thinking with your kiddo at home, and answer your real-life questions about negative thoughts.

Buy The Magical Yet or listen online for free

How to Talk About Balanced Thinking with Your Child
We want to make developing balanced thinking skills feel as approachable as possible. Here are some ideas of how you can talk to your child about making unhelpful thoughts more balanced. We’ve included some comments to help you understand why we recommend these steps.

Questions From Our Community About Balanced Thinking

Q: Before music lessons, my kid often says he doesn’t want to go because it’s too long & too hard to learn new things. Once he’s there, he often seems to like it and feel proud. How can I help when he wants to avoid going to practice?

A: This is an excellent question. The first step is to ask what kinds of thoughts he’s having before music class. When he says it’s too long or too hard, you might ask:
“Hey, what is your brain telling you is going to happen at music practice today?”

Once you identify the thought, it can be helpful to explore with him how true that thought is. For example, you might say, “Ok, it sounds like your brain is telling you, ‘It’s going to be really hard, and I’m going to do a bad job.’ Is that thought 100% true, partly true, or not at all true?”

Often, kids can recognize: “I guess I don’t know 100%. I might have a hard time with some parts, but I might do okay in others. I practiced a lot this week.” This is a great start because it helps them see that their thoughts might not be completely accurate. In this example, they might start to realize that they can’t predict the future, even if their brain tells them they’re definitely going to struggle.

Then you can ask: “Okay, if we know it’s not 100% true that you’re going to do poorly in class, what’s a more true version of that thought?” Or, if that feels too abstract, another helpful approach is: “If you had a friend in music class who said, ‘I know I’m going to do terribly today,’ what would you tell that friend?”

Then you can help him come up with a more balanced, more true thought, such as:

• “Music practice might feel hard because I’m still learning”

• “I don’t know for sure I’ll do a bad job — all I can do is try”

• “I don’t know how to play this song yet — but every time I practice I improve!”

• “I might struggle with some parts, and I might do well in others”

Once he has picked a new truer version of the thought, it can be helpful to ask: “How do you feel when you think that new thought?” This can help your kiddo understand that by making thoughts truer and more balanced often makes us feel more hopeful and ready to take on a challenge, even when the situation itself hasn’t changed.

Q: Sometimes my child gets frustrated by a new task and begins to yell or cry — what can I do to help her think through how to accomplish it?

A: This is such an important question. When kids are trying something new, it can feel really frustrating or overwhelming. Kids are learning so many new things all the time, and these new challenges can bring up a lot of big emotions.

If your kiddo is already at the point of yelling or crying, this is when we would want to consider focusing on coping skills first (like belly breathing or other safe ways to calm their body). The goal here is to help them regulate the intensity of their emotions in their body or to “bring the feelings thermometer down.”

When they’re feeling calmer, then you can come back to the balanced thinking skills we talked about above. Keep in mind this might be several hours later or even the next day. Cognitive skills are really hard to use when a kid is in a very emotional space, so waiting until they relaxed will give you the best bang for your buck.

Go deeper on the science of coping with unhelpful thoughts and balanced thinking:

1. This handout from Anxiety Canada goes in depth on how parents can teach balanced thinking skills to kids!

2. This video is a great resources for teaching kids about the “cognitive triangle” — how thoughts drive feelings and actions.

3. We also love this adult-focused NHS resource about balanced thinking, especially this video on challenging unhelpful thoughts.

4. We like this card game for helping older kids (5+) discover the connection between their thoughts and feelings and actions!

5. For ideas on dealing with parenting-related fears and worries using balanced thinking, check out this post! 🌸

6. Vanderbilt Professor Steven Hollon, a leading expert in cognitive therapy, was interviewed on the “Let’s Talk CBT” podcast, and it’s worth a listen! We like the way Dr. Hollon describes helping people suffer less through balanced thinking — for example, he has said “I…. take offense at the way [my clients’] inaccurate beliefs lead them to beat up on themselves.”

Have you noticed your child using negative self-talk? Have you considered helping them try out balanced thinking? Share your experiences or questions about negative thinking in the comments!

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FYI: The links above for buying The Magical Yet are affiliate links (see this page for more information).

The Magical Yet: A picture book about balanced thinking for kids (age 5+)

Each week, we recommend one kids book that teaches a mental health concept. Today, we’re sharing a book that teaches a coping skill for managing unhelpful or hurtful thoughts: The Magical Yet, written by Angela DiTerlizzi and illustrated by Lorena Alvarez Gómez. This book highlights the concept of balanced thinking — the idea that changing the way you think can change how you feel and act! Read on to learn why we recommend The Magical Yet to the parents we know, the science behind balanced thinking, and tips for talking to your kiddo about unhelpful thoughts.

About the Book
The Magical Yet is about a child who gets really frustrated while trying to learn to ride her bike. Just when she vows that she’ll never ride again, she’s visited by the Magical Yet, a fairy-life creature who helps the kid think differently about the situation — it’s not that she can’t ride her bike… it’s that she can’t do it yet! With this new mindset, the child sticks with her bike practice and, through do-overs, re-dos, stumbles, and flops, figures out how to ride. With colorful, enchanting illustrations, Magical Yet highlights that we all have the “magical” power to shift our perspective, and by changing our thinking, we can make hard situations easier to face.

Buy The Magical Yet or listen online for free

What Science Tells Us about Balanced Thinking
How we talk to ourselves matters, including when we’re learning new skills. In psychology, cognitive theory says that our thoughts influence our emotions and behaviors. This theory says that negative, hurtful, or untrue thoughts (like “I can’t ride my bike,” “I’ll never learn how,” or even “I’ve failed”) can lead to negative emotions (like sadness or frustration) or unhelpful behavior (like giving up). This also means that when we’re feeling a difficult emotion, there’s often a hurtful or untrue thought driving that feeling.

Once we catch a hurtful or untrue thought, we can address it using a skill called “balanced thinking,” which involves finding more helpful and true ways to talk to ourselves. This skill has many names, including “cognitive restructuring” and “cognitive coping.” Balanced thinking is a core part of cognitive and behavioral therapy (CBT). Countless meta-analyses have found balanced thinking effective for a wide array of different problems, including depression, anxiety, stress, and anger. Studies focused on kids and teens specifically have found that balanced thinking helps kids struggling with depression, anxiety, and anger. Balanced thinking works fast: A new meta-analysis found that learning balanced thinking in a single therapy session can reduce patients’ symptoms of depression by the very next session.

We love that Magical Yet highlights how balanced thinking can help kids in upsetting moments in their daily lives. Here are some tips for helping kids practice balanced thinking:

1. Identify an unhelpful thought. When a kiddo is experiencing negative emotions, we can ask, “What is your brain telling you?" An unhelpful thought could sound like “I always mess up!” “Everyone hates me,” or “I never get what I want.”

2. Ask some questions about the thought: “Is that thought 100% true, partly true, or not at all true? Is it helpful or hurtful? What’s not true/unhelpful about that thought?”

3. Find ways to balance the thought by making it more true and more helpful:

   1. A lot of times, changing just one word can make a thought more true, like swapping “never” or “always” with “sometimes” (e.g., “I never win” can become “I sometimes win”).

   2. To make thoughts more helpful, we can ask questions like, “What would you say to a friend?” or “What could you say to yourself that would be more helpful?” For example, “I’m stupid” is hurtful, but “I’m learning” is helpful. Many of us would say “I’m stupid” to ourselves, but would be much kinder when talking to a friend about the same situation.

   3. Remember that even true thoughts can often be made more helpful (“I failed my test” may be true, but it may be more helpful to tell ourselves “I failed, but now I know how I should study for the next one").

For older kids, parents can help draw the connection between balanced thinking and helpful actions. For example, saying “I’m stupid” might make us want to quit practicing something, while saying “I’m learning” might motivate us to keep trying. For younger ages, the connection between thoughts and actions can be a little complex, so we recommend focusing first on the link between thoughts and feelings (e.g., hurtful thoughts make us feel sad, helpful thoughts make us feel excited).

What Marin likes about The Magical Yet: When I am teaching balanced thinking, one of the responses I often get from my clients is “Wow, it’s like a superpower!” I love that this book takes the power of balanced thinking and illustrates how magical it can be. Often, kids may feel frustrated or powerless because they are still learning so much, and many of their daily choices are decided by caregivers and authority figures. Kids often find it very empowered to learn that even if a situation stays exactly the same, they can change their experience and sometimes the outcome of the situation just by changing their thoughts.

What Betsy likes about The Magical Yet: I really love how this book shows how darn frustrating it can be when we can’t initially figure out how to do something! The illustration of how angry the child in Yet looks as she pushes her bike home felt really relatable to me. This book made me think about how getting frustrated when trying new skills actually reflects being excited about gaining a new skill or ability. That’s actually a really cool thing!

One thing to clarify about The Magical Yet: The balanced thinking skill shown in Magical Yet is very subtle! The book never directly says the lesson taught by the Magical Yet. After reading the book, it might help some kids to talk directly about the book’s message: When we can’t do something now, it just means that we can’t do it yet.

Buy The Magical Yet or listen online for free

We think The Magical Yet would be a great addition to any child’s library. We’d love to hear your reactions to this review and your questions about coping with unhelpful or hurtful thoughts — we’ll highlight some answers in future posts. Reply to this email, or join our community to leave a comment!

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FYI: The links above for buying The Magical Yet are affiliate links (see this page for more information).

Last week, we recommended Tummy Ride, which highlights the concept of belly breathing — the idea that taking deep and slow breaths low in the diaphragm can help us make big emotions smaller and help us feel safer when we are stressed (read that post here). This week, we share some resources to try belly breathing with your kiddo at home, and answer your real-life questions about calming down big emotions.

Buy Tummy Ride or listen online for free

How to Talk About Belly Breathing with Your Child
We want to make practicing belly breathing feel as approachable as possible. Here are some ideas of how you can talk to your child about belly breathing. We’ve included some comments to help you understand why we recommend these steps.

We can practice belly breathing when emotions are high, but we wouldn’t want to teach it for the first time when the kid is activated. We recommend introducing belly breathing first to your child when you’re both relaxed — and doing a short practice daily as a family to help the skill become muscle memory!

Questions From Our Community About Belly Breathing

Q: What can I do if my kid doesn’t want to practice belly breathing? How do I get them to use it when they are getting upset or frustrated?

A: What an excellent question! One of our go-to parenting skills for helping encourage kids to practice any behavior more is specific praise. To encourage belly breathing (especially when your child is stressed or frustrated), you can gently prompt:
“Now might be a good time to practice some belly breathing. Let’s try taking a deep breath together, low and slow in our bellies.”

As soon as they start, heap on the praise! The key to shaping kids’ behaviors through specific praise is to name the specific behavior you want to see more of:

• “Excellent job, you’re taking such a deep breath.”

• “Great work! I love that you’re slowing down and taking a belly breath.”

• “Awesome job belly breathing, let’s take another one together.”

Specific praise works well because kids care a LOT about your attention. Giving your child specific, positive attention for a behavior you want to encourage — like belly breathing — reinforces the behavior. The more you praise the behavior, the more they’ll be encouraged to keep doing it. So, try to “catch” them each time you see them belly breathing and offer specific praise right away. Check out our post and how-to guide on specific praise for more examples!

Another powerful tool is modeling. This might look like co-regulation (you calming your body to help them calm theirs), or simply showing your child what you do when you feel stressed: “I am feeling stressed — I need to take a deep breath,” or “It looks like Daddy is going to pause and do some belly breathing.” Kids are always watching and learning, so your modeling helps reinforce belly breathing as a great skill to use when feelings get big.

Go deeper on the science and practice of belly breathing:

1. We reviewed a bunch of different belly breathing videos, and our favorite one is this one from Nemours Health. We like that it shows how to use belly breathing in close-up detail with a real teen — the close-up camera shots let you watch the belly expand during an in breath and contract during an out breath. We think this is the best video for parents to watch to learn how to teach belly breathing!

2. … but if you want to get your kiddo excited about belly breathing, we think this video from Sesame Street is the most fun option.

3. This “breathing balloon” online activity can help kids learn to do belly breathing as they watch a balloon inflate and deflate.

4. This article from the Raising Children Network has some nice ideas on using belly breathing with kids with developmental disabilities.

5. If you want to go even deeper on the science behind belly breathing — and how breathing can affect the parasympathetic nervous system — check out this Scientific American article.

Do you notice your child experiencing big emotions or signs of body activation? Have you considered trying belly breathing with them? Share your experiences or questions about belly breathing in the comments!

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FYI: The links above for buying Tummy Ride are affiliate links (see this page for more information).

Tummy Ride: A board book about belly breathing for toddlers (age 1+)

Each week, we recommend one kids book that teaches a mental health concept. Today, we’re sharing a book that tackles a favorite coping skill for helping kids manage big feelings: Tummy Ride, written by Whitney Stewart and illustrated by Rocío Alejandro. This book highlights the concept of belly breathing — the idea that taking deep and slow breaths low in the belly can help us make big emotions smaller and help us cope when we are stressed. Read on to learn why we recommend Tummy Ride to the parents we know, the science behind belly breathing, and how you can think about practicing it with your child.

About the Book
Tummy Ride is an adorable board book featuring kids practicing belly breathing in all sorts of places — on the floor, on the beach, in the pool! The book shows kids using body cues — like resting hands or a toy on the tummy — to ensure their belly expands during inhales and contracts during exhales. We love how Tummy Ride represents a diversity of kids and families and features fun illustrations (like a kid and her dog practicing belly breathing together and kids wearing mermaid costumes).

Buy Tummy Ride or listen online for free

What Science Tells Us about Belly Breathing
When we’re experiencing big emotions, it can often be hard to think straight. This is because when we feel big emotions like fear or anger, they often trigger the fight-or-flight response. This means that our body activates its system in charge of protecting us from danger, the sympathetic nervous system. During these moments, the sympathetic nervous system sends signals to many different parts of the body, like telling our heart to beat fast and our muscles to tense up. It also tells our breathing system to speed up and breathe faster — the theory is this helps get more oxygen to the body, which is needed to fight or flee. When we have big emotions or feel stressed, these body changes often happen without us realizing, but they can make us feel uncomfortable, like feeling lightheaded or numb or having tingling sensations. This can create a vicious cycle: We feel anxious, our sympathetic nervous system activates, we start breathing faster, this causes unpleasant sensations in our body, our anxiety increases, we breathe even faster — and the loop keeps reinforcing itself.

Belly breathing (also called diaphragmatic breathing) is a tool we can use to disrupt this cycle, make big emotions smaller, and help our bodies and brains realize we are safe. By purposefully taking deep and slow breaths low in the diaphragm (the muscle that divides our chest from our belly and helps us breathe), we can disrupt the fight-or-flight reaction. Meta-analytic research (which combines the results of multiple studies) has found that belly breathing activates our parasympathetic nervous system, which helps us “rest and digest.” Specifically, belly breathing led to higher heart rate variability (the way the timing between participants’ heartbeats changed over time), which is a sign of being calm and relaxed. Another study randomized over 300 kids — around age 7 — to either watch a 1-minute video teaching belly breathing or a control video. Kids who watched the belly breathing video had slower heart rates and greater heart rate variability, indicating that belly breathing can directly calm down kids’ nervous systems.

Parents can help their kiddos learn belly breathing as a coping skill for when feelings get big or their bodies feel keyed up or stressed out. This is a great skill to use when a kid’s anger or fear gets so big they don’t know what to do. We like this skill because we have so few ways to talk directly to our bodies or change how we feel physically, but belly breathing lets us tell our bodies “you’re safe” when our brains mistakenly think we’re in danger.

Since we typically can’t think straight when we’re having big emotions, we recommend first trying out belly breathing when you and your child are relaxed. To help this skill become muscle memory, we recommend practicing daily for 1 minute as a family. Your family can learn belly breathing with these steps:

1. Breathe in slowly through your nose for a few seconds, letting your stomach expand until it feels full of air (like a bubble or a balloon, round and full).

2. Hold the air for a few seconds.

3. Then breathe out slowly, contracting your belly until all the air is gone (like you have let all the air out of the balloon, and it is now flat and empty).

4. Repeat again from step one until you feel yourself relax. If you have time, try to do at least 10 breaths!

These steps can be done either sitting or lying down on the ground and relaxing your muscles, like this:

We recommend using one of these body cues to help kids (and adults) learn the sensation of belly breathing:

• Fill the ballon. From a sitting position, put your hand on your belly and pretend your belly is a balloon. Breathe in and feel the balloon expand, then breathe out and feel the balloon shrink.

• Push the book. From sitting, hold a book flat across your belly. Watch the book move forward as you breathe in, and backwards (towards your body) as you breathe out.

• Send your stuffed animal on a ride. Lay on your back, put a stuffed animal on your stomach and watch it rise up as you breathe in and fall down as you breathe out. See how high you can make it go!

What Betsy likes about Tummy Ride: We vetted ten different books about belly breathing, and this was one of the only ones we found that actually teaches this skill correctly! The key is that your belly gets bigger and pushes out when you’re inhaling, and gets smaller and sucks in when you’re exhaling. Oftentimes, when we feel anxious, our bodies naturally breathe faster and higher up in our chests. With belly breathing, we do the opposite — keep our breath slow and low in our bellies. We love how this book shows correct examples of belly breathing on every single page!

What Marin likes about Tummy Ride: I absolutely fell in love with this book because it does such a great job of teaching belly breathing, including using one of my favorite body cues. When I am teaching this skill to kiddos in therapy, I love having them pick a favorite toy to ride on their bellies as they breathe in, just like it shows in the book. Giving a stuffed animal a ride up to the sky is such an easy way for you and your kids to know if they have got this skill down. I’m also so excited that they wrote this board book for toddlers. Belly breathing is a skill anyone of any age can benefit from!

One thing we don’t love about Tummy Ride: Tummy Ride doesn’t tell a story — it’s really just about teaching the correct technique for belly breathing in a fun and silly way. The words are a bit repetitive. When we read this book, we like to get creative, reading the parts we like (like “your wave lifts your hands up high/your wave brings your hands down low”) and pointing out the cute illustrations to highlight all the ways to practice belly breathing (“Look at this kiddo laying in the pool - he has a rubber duck on his tummy!”).

Buy Tummy Ride or listen online for free

We think Tummy Ride would be a great addition to any child’s library. We’d love to hear your reactions to this review and your questions about belly breathing — we’ll highlight some answers in future posts. Reply to this email, or join our community to leave a comment!

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FYI: The links above for buying Tummy Ride are affiliate links (see this page for more information).

I Can Be Safe: A picture book about safety for kids (age 5+)

Last week, we recommended I Can Be Safe, which highlights the concept of safety skills — the idea that actively practicing skills for handling risky or dangerous situations empowers kids and helps them avoid harm (read that post here). This week, we share some resources to help you help your child develop safety skills, and answer your real-life questions about safety and empowering kids.

Buy I Can Be Safe or listen online for free

How to Talk About Safety with Your Child
We want to make developing safety skills feel as approachable as possible. Here are some ideas of how you can talk to your child about less safe situations. We’ve included some comments to help you understand why we recommend these steps.

This discussion is just the beginning, and would need to be followed by rehearsing in real life, feedback, and regular practice of the skill. A great version of follow-up practice would be the parent taking the child to their school and standing in the pick-up zone and saying, “Let’s practice what you would do if a person you didn’t know tries to pick you up at school. I’ll pretend to be that unknown person…”

Questions From Our Community About Safety Skills

Q: How do you balance letting your kids take risks with keeping them safe?

A: This is one of the most common questions about safety for child psychologists! We like to encourage parents to trust their child’s instincts about which skills and activities they’re ready to try. For example, Betsy’s toddler recently looked like he was about to jump off a high platform on the playground's play structure. Through his actions, he was communicating to her that he’s ready to practice taking some big jumps. At this moment, she had concerns about the platform’s height, but we wouldn’t recommend that she only tell him, “Jumping’s not safe - no jumping!” because we don’t want to quash his opportunities to practice this developmental skill.

Instead, we want to encourage parents to trust their instincts about potential safety concerns and work with their child to find a safer way to practice the same skill. When you are in this moment of balancing letting your kid take risks while keeping them safe, try asking yourself: What are the realistic dangers here? Can we find a safer way for them to do the same activity and practice the same skill? Here, Betsy might have asked herself: Is this so high that he could be injured? Would it be safe for him to jump from this height if I were holding his hands? Can we practice big jumps at a lower height, so he can practice this skill? As much as you can, we recommend following your child’s instincts and the skills they’re naturally trying to grow into, but consider whether the context in which they are practicing needs to be modified to be safer at their current developmental level.

Q: What if I don’t know if something is safe or unsafe for my child?

A: This is such a great question, and it is easy for parents to fall into the habit of categorizing situations as safe or unsafe as quick mental shortcuts. But it's important to remember that safety is a spectrum: activities can be more or less safe (i.e., present more or less risk of harm), but nothing is ever perfectly safe or unsafe. When you are unsure how much danger a situation or activity poses for your child, we recommend first checking in with yourself and asking whether you’re worried about this activity because of your own fear or because of realistic safety concerns. Sometimes, as caregivers, we can get stuck on a safety rule we set for one developmental period, but as they grow, that rule is no longer keeping them safe and is now preventing their growth. But letting go of the rule (that has previously done such a great job of keeping them safe!) can feel really scary. This is a great moment to talk it through with a co-parent or ask other parents you know for a second opinion, and to hear how they dealt with transitioning into that activity at your child’s age.

If you are struggling to decide whether an activity is safe for your child because little ones’ abilities are always changing, you can also learn a lot of information by observing other kids in your environment. Look around the playground or schoolyard to see what types of activities kids are doing. If you see a kid around your child’s developmental level doing the same activity, this is a pretty good indication that you could let your child try it out safely.

Go deeper on the science and practice of safety skills:

1. If you are interested in age-by-age guidelines for talking with kids about safety, this Johns Hopkins Medicine website offers practical tips and example language for discussing safety skills with children in different grade ranges.

2. Internet safety is part of everyday safety! This short video by Amaze.org can be an awesome starting point for introducing simple recommendations to help kids stay safer online.

3. This Safety Hand activity is a great way to help kids practice naming several trusted adults so they know who to contact (and how to reach them) if they feel unsafe or need help.

4. This printable booklet covers how to talk with kids about personal safety at home, at school, and in an emergency.

5. If you are interested in learning more about the research behind strategies for firearm prevention for young kids (ages 0-5), check out this recent review article.

Have you talked to your child about how to handle less safe situations? Have you considered rehearsing these skills with your child? Share your experiences or questions about safety and handling risky situations in the comments!

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FYI: The links above for buying I Can Be Safe are affiliate links (see this page for more information).

As a reminder, we’re trying out a new format to create space to answer your questions about each post’s mental health skill before we introduce a new topic. We’re now introducing a new evidence-based skill and accompanying kids’ book every other week, and on the alternate week, we offer examples and answer your questions about using the skill in your real life. We’re hoping this change makes our posts even more digestible for busy parents. We’d love to hear what you think about this new format, or other ideas for how we can improve Minds in Bloom. Tell us what you think in the comments or over email: mindsinbloombooks@gmail.com 🌸

I Can Be Safe: A picture book about safety for kids (age 5+)

Each week, we recommend one kids book that teaches a mental health concept. Today, we’re sharing a book that tackles safety: I Can Be Safe, written by Pat Thomas and illustrated by Lesley Harker. This book highlights the concept of safety skills — the idea that actively practicing skills for handling risky or dangerous situations empowers kids and helps them avoid harm. Read on to learn why we recommend I Can Be Safe to the parents we know, the science behind safety skills, and tips for talking to your kiddo about risk and danger.

About the Book
I Can Be Safe introduces the concept of safety in a kid-friendly way and talks about staying safe across a range of situations, from riding a bike, to crossing the road, to being approached by a stranger. The book empowers kids by teaching them concrete steps they can take to keep themselves safe, both preventative, like learning to swim and knowing their home address and phone number, and reactive, like telling a trusted adult if someone touches their body inappropriately. We like how I Can Be Safe introduces the concepts of danger and safety skills to kids in a frank and simple manner.

Buy I Can Be Safe or listen online for free

What Science Tells Us about Safety Skills
It is scary for parents to think about a child encountering danger. Fortunately, research has shown that we can proactively teach children skills to use for when they encounter something dangerous. By teaching kids safety skills, we can empower them to navigate risky or dangerous situations.

Safety skills involve the following four steps:

1. Identifying the danger

2. Avoiding the danger

3. Escaping the danger

4. Reporting what happened

For example, I Can Be Safe coaches kids on 1) noticing if someone is trying to talk to them or touch them in a way that makes them feel unsafe or afraid (identify), 2) saying no (avoid), 3) shouting or kicking at the person (escape), and 4) telling a trusted grown-up if this happens (report).

How do we know that teaching safety skills works? Because dangerous situations happen relatively rarely, this can make it hard for parents to know if a child really knows how to use a safety skill they’ve been taught. In fact, one study showed that even kids who know how to deal with firearms safely during role plays need additional practice to be able to use these skills in real-life situations. Fortunately, researchers came up with a clever approach called “in situ assessment.” This means creating a realistic but safe situation that the child doesn’t know is a test. For example, a parent might send their child into the kitchen, where researchers have placed an open pill bottle on the counter. The child doesn’t know the pills are fake and that they’re being observed. Researchers then watch to see if the child uses the core safety steps: Noticing the pills (identify), choosing not to touch them (avoid), walking away (escape), and telling a parent (report). This kind of setup has helped researchers learn how children respond to dangerous situations like finding an unattended firearm or something poisonous, or even navigating an attempted kidnapping.

Using this approach, researchers have shown that only active learning helps children learn safety skills. Other approaches, like telling your child how to act in a dangerous situation without having them practice, aren’t enough. It’s crucial that your child has the opportunity to practice safety skills in real-world settings. This process should involve:

• Teaching (describing a dangerous situation and what it would look like for the child to identify, avoid, escape, and report the danger in that situation)

• Modeling (demonstrating those safety skills to your child)

• Rehearsing (asking your child to practice demonstrating the safety skills)

• Feedback (praising your child for correctly using the safety skills, and helping them improve their skill use).

Parents can use I Can Be Safe as a jumping-off point to discuss many different places where kids need safety skills. We especially love the discussion question boxes sprinkled throughout the book to start the “teaching” and “modeling” steps!

Stay tuned for our post next week, where we’ll give you an example of how to practice safety skills with your kid at home.

What Marin likes about I Can Be Safe: When I teach safety skills in therapy, parents often feel confident that their child has the basics covered. But when we ask a child to share a parent’s full name, phone number, or address during session, kids often struggle to remember these basics in real time. I always remind parents that this isn’t anyone’s fault. Most kids often can share this information when it is first taught, but over time, without real-world practice, even important safety skills can fade. I love that all the discussion question boxes in this book remind parents and kids that regular, everyday practice is what makes these skills stick! Simple ideas like letting your child help guide their walk home once a week, typing in phone numbers together to call your co-parent, or spending a whole week calling each other by your full names can make a big difference. This book does a great job of reminding us that regular safety skills practice can be fun and spontaneous, and this kind of practice builds kids’ confidence to use them when it really counts.

What Betsy likes about I Can Be Safe: I really like the page that talks about how fear is an instinct designed to let us know when things are not safe, which aligns with what we talked about the Q&A about fear and anxiety last week. The book encourages kids to notice different body signals that might indicate they are unsafe: Your stomach or your head feeling funny, your heart beating faster, or having a hard time breathing. I love how I Can Be Safe lets kids know that fear can tell them an important message, and it encourages kids to trust their own judgment.

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We think I Can Be Safe would be a great addition to any child’s library. We’d love to hear your reactions to this review and your questions about safety skills — we’ll highlight some answers in future posts. Reply to this email, or join our community to leave a comment!

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Last week, we recommended Orion and the Dark, which highlights the concept of exposure — the idea that approaching things we’re afraid of makes them less scary and builds confidence (read that post here). This week, we are sharing some resources to help you try exposure with your kiddo at home, and answering your real-life questions about exposure and fear.

Buy Orion and the Dark or listen online for free

How to Talk About Exposure with Your Child
We want to make practicing exposure feel as approachable as possible. Here are some ideas of how you can talk to your child about fear and exposure. We’ve included some comments to help you understand why we recommend these steps.

Remember that kids usually need to practice facing their fears multiple times and working up to harder situations to get the full benefit from exposure. With consistent practice, their scared feeling will start to get smaller, and they will begin to feel more confident about approaching their fears.

Questions From Our Community About Exposure and Fear

Q: What’s the best way to respond when my toddler gets startled by things, like a dog barking or the fridge alarm going off?

A: Great question! Fear is an important human emotion that helps us stay safe, and it’s important that kids learn to trust their fear instinct. On the other hand, we don’t want kids to feel paralyzed by fear — we want to teach them to engage in the world with caution and awareness when they feel scared. Parents can pay attention to what their child is afraid of and use this to guide their response. For situations that do present some amount of danger (realistic fears), the goal is to help kids learn to listen to their fear and respond with safety skills. For situations where the fear is unrealistic or where danger is highly unlikely, the goal is to help the child bravely face their fear. Often, kids are still learning what realistic and unrealistic fears are, so parents play an important role in helping them learn the difference.

Alarms and barking dogs could both be considered realistic fears. They contain potentially important safety information — many alarms exist to help us stay safe, like car horns or fire alarms, and a dog barking can signal that the dog needs space. It’s also very normal for kids to be startled by these types of loud noises. We don’t want to encourage kids to ignore information that could help them stay safe, but we also don’t want to encourage avoidance of a safe situation, like running out of the kitchen every time the fridge alarm goes off.

Situations that contain real signals of potential danger can be a great opportunity to help kiddos practice safety skills. Parents can teach their kids how to check in with a trusted adult about the scary situation to help them distinguish safe from unsafe things, like asking an adult, “Is the fridge ok?” or practice approaching the scary thing together to learn if it is safe or not. Another option is to plan ahead of time how to respond safely to realistic fears, like discussing how to safely retreat from sounds that signal threat. For example, your child probably doesn’t need to check in with you every time your family dog barks at the mail delivery. But if an unfamiliar dog is barking in your yard, you can teach them a clear safety plan: Back up slowly, go inside, and call for a trusted adult.

Either way, the goal is to help the child trust their own fear instincts and learn to stay safe around realistic and likely dangers, while approaching rather than avoiding unrealistic fears. Next week, we will talk more about teaching kids safety skills — stay tuned!

Q: My 4-year-old sometimes says he is afraid of ghosts, so I made a “ghost spray” to use to “scare ghosts away.” Is that helpful or hurtful?

A: This is a great example of a common yet unrealistic fear — we know that ghosts won’t cause kids harm. When kids fear unrealistic things like ghosts or monsters, parents can really lean into using exposure to help their kids overcome these fears.

This reader asked about ghost sprays, and we often see parents trying everything under the sun to help their kids feel better in the face of anxiety. Unfortunately, ghost spray is an example of something that may be inadvertently keeping anxiety alive — it may work in the short-term to temporarily reduce the kiddo’s anxiety, but it doesn’t help the kid overcome the fear in the long term, and could have the added downside of making the kid think they NEED the ghost spray to be okay. This is a good example of what we call avoidance — things kids and adults do to help themselves not have to face their fears. When we do anxiety treatment, we work with families to reduce avoidance behaviors to help the child overcome their fears fully. Approaching the feared situation and testing out whether the fear is likely to happen is the best way to challenge the strength of the unrealistic fear.

What could a parent do instead in this situation? A childhood exposure expert we know would probably say, “You don’t need a ghost spray, you need a ghost summoner!” Rather than trying to keep the ghosts away, an exposure framework would lead us to try and get the ghosts to come towards us (aka approach the fear rather than avoid it). This would involve working with the child to create a list of places and situations where they believe a ghost encounter is most likely to occur (in the closet? in the basement? at nighttime?), and then gradually approaching those situations, from easiest to hardest. Through repeated exposures, the kiddo will have the important experience of learning that 1) the ghosts never come, even when we try to approach them, and 2) if a scary noise (like a house creak) does happen after they “summon” a ghost, that they can handle that scary sound. Even though it might feel really hard to sit with the fear at first, with repeated practice of facing their unrealistic fear in different ways and different places, they will start to learn they are safe, and their anxiety will get smaller over time.

Remember, exposure can be fun, even when it's really hard. Maybe this is a chance to set out the ghost’s favorite toy, to see if he comes to play, or throw a tea party and invite some ghosts to tea. 👻

Go deeper on the science of fear and exposure:

1. We love this handout from Seattle Children’s Hospital on steps parents can take to help kids struggling with fear/anxiety, and this instruction guide from the Mayo Clinic on how to do parent-coached exposures.

2. This article and video from Baylor University go in depth on how avoidance keeps anxiety alive, using the example of being afraid of talking to another person (a social fear).

3. This worksheet from an anxiety-focused non-profit is a great option for helping young kids hop like a bunny “down the worry path” to face their fears one small step at a time.

4. To learn more about the science behind why it is so helpful for parents to help coach their kids through their exposure practice, check out these two recent trials.

5. Also from Baylor, the Learning to Understand and Navigate Anxiety (LUNA) lab offers free online resources for doing exposure therapy with both younger children and teens. This is a great resource for parents who want more structured support for trying out exposure therapy at home.

Do you notice your child having moments of fear or anxiety? Have you considered trying exposure? Share your experiences or questions about fear and anxiety in the comments!

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FYI: The links above for buying Orion and the Dark are affiliate links (see this page for more information).

Orion and the Dark: A picture book about fear for preschoolers (age 3+)

Each week, we recommend one kids book that teaches a mental health concept. Today, we’re sharing a book that tackles fear: Orion and the Dark, written and illustrated by Emma Yarlett. This book highlights the concept of exposure — the idea that approaching things we’re afraid of makes them less scary and builds confidence. Read on to learn why we recommend Orion and the Dark to the parents we know, the science behind exposure, and tips for talking to your kiddo about fear.

About the Book
Orion and the Dark features a little boy named Orion who is afraid of dogs, monsters, spiders, and the ocean, but is most afraid of the dark. One night, Orion gets so fed up that he yells at the dark to go away, and the Dark — embodied in a large, soft creature who looks like the night sky — enters his skylight. The Dark invites Orion on an adventure, and despite his fear, Orion goes along. The two explore dark and shadowy parts of Orion’s house, look for the source of scary sounds in the neighborhood, and even travel up into the scary starry sky. Orion’s willingness to move towards the thing he’s afraid of, like spending time with the Dark and visiting dark places he’s afraid of, showcases the science-backed skill of exposure.

Buy Orion and the Dark or listen online for free

What Science Tells Us about Fear
When we feel afraid, it triggers the fight or flight reaction — our brains, sensing danger, try to find ways to protect us, like telling us to hide or run away (we’ve also talked about how the fight or flight reaction relates to tantrums). In kids, “flight” behaviors aren’t always obvious, and sometimes when kids have developed a fear, they simply start avoiding the thing they’re afraid of altogether, like a child with a fear of dogs refusing to go to the house of a friend with a dog.

Avoidance works in the short term to reduce anxiety, but doesn’t get rid of the fear in the long term — if I’m afraid of dogs, I might feel better when I avoid one, but that doesn’t make me any less scared of dogs the next time I see one. Avoidance can actually even makes your anxiety worse over time — if when I avoid a dog, my brain feels relief, this can mistakenly tell my brain that dogs really must be dangerous. Avoidance also keeps us from having learning opportunities — if I always avoid dogs, my brain never gets a chance to learn that most of the time dogs are safe to be around.

To help kids break this cycle, we use a technique called exposure, a core component of cognitive behavioral therapy. Exposure is one of the most well-established treatments we have in psychology. It involves repeatedly approaching or moving towards the thing we’re afraid of, just like Orion does when he spends time with the Dark. Exposure is different than purposefully trying to scare your child or keeping them in a scary situation when they’re upset. Rather, exposure involves making a plan ahead of time with your child for ways they can start approaching the thing they fear, and then carrying out that plan. Several studies have shown that exposure is effective for treating fear and anxiety in children and adolescents. Research has also shown that exposure is more effective than other skills, like relaxation, which makes sense because relaxation doesn’t target the underlying issue of avoidance. Before fear or anxiety problems develop in kids or teens, parents can help promote a “brave” attitude by noticing things their child seems to be afraid of and helping them move towards it.

Practically, here’s how you can use exposure at home with your own kid.

1. Find a safe situation that they’re afraid of (e.g., dogs, vacuum, the dark, etc.). Help your child identify what they’re afraid will happen (e.g., the dog will bite me, monsters will get me). You don’t need to tell your child these things won’t happen — just talk about their belief with them plainly (e.g., “I see, your brain tells you that if you go near a dog, it will bite you.”).

2. Talk about how avoiding scary yet safe situations actually feeds the fear, and how “being brave” and moving towards these situations can actually help make them less scary.

3. Work with your child to list some steps they could take to approach the situation. You can think of easy steps and harder steps.

4. Try to help your child stay in the situation. For the best effect, staying in the situation for up to 20 minutes can help kids learn that the situation is safe. If they start to feel bored instead of terrified, you are on the right track!

5. Afterwards, ask your child about whether the thing they were afraid of happening actually happened (e.g., “I know your brain was telling the dog would bite you if you went near it. Did the dog bite you?”). This helps your child’s brain start to build new connections between the thing they fear and ideas of safety (sometimes we talk about “recalibrating your brain’s danger meter”).

What Marin likes about Orion and the Dark: The narration in this book is such a beautiful illustration of how our feeling of fear can become a companion that joins us while we practice being brave, like how The Dark joins Orion. Sometimes we think that exposures should “get rid” of our scared feelings, but in reality, exposures are a practice that focuses on bringing our hard feelings along while we keep trying new things. The dreamy illustrations remind me that there is a vast world for all of us to explore and be curious about, one step at a time. Inviting our feelings of fear along is often the key to taking a step forward.

What Betsy likes about Orion and the Dark: I love how Orion discovers that some of the darkest places — like the closet, under the bed, and in the basement — are actually the most fun! Fear can drown out other emotions, but when we are brave and go towards the things we’re afraid of, it opens us up to new experiences. There’s actually some brand-new research showing that experiencing positive emotions like hope and joy after an exposure is related to exposure therapy working well. Sometimes in therapy we even use humor or make fun of the thing we’re afraid of (“Silly dark, you made goofy noises to try to scare me!”), which can help bring positive emotions to exposure work.

Buy Orion and the Dark or listen online for free

We think Orion and the Dark would be a great addition to any child’s library. We’d love to hear your reactions to this review and your questions about exposure — we’ll highlight some answers in future posts. Reply to this email, or join our community to leave a comment!

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FYI: The links above for buying Orion and the Dark are affiliate links (see this page for more information).