Why make a book about it?
Making a book with your child offers you a unique and powerful tool for helping your child cope with difficult and challenging experiences. Creating a book together allows your child to grapple with and master the powerful, often sad or scary emotions the experience evokes. It also enables you to elicit, validate, and support your child's feelings.
It can be a lot of fun and a wonderful keepsake, and also an invaluable coping aid. For a young child, the process of making a concrete object by cutting and pasting, drawing, dictating, and writing is much more helpful than reading a ready made book. A ready-made book, as helpful as it may be, can leave your child with a sense of how one "ought to feel," while a book made by your child truly validates whatever your child feels. In addition, the open-ended nature of a Let's Make a Book About It book allows your child to express genuine, uncensored feelings in a creative way at her own level.
All you need to make a book with your child is a pair of child-safe scissors, paste or tape, assorted crayons or colored pencils, a camera/IPhone (optional), old magazines, and time.
I have published 2 such books titled Let’s Make a Book About It, that may be useful for you and your child.
We Are Moving is out of print but available from second-hand online book sellers.
My Pet Died can be ordered directly from me (use the Contact button below to email me).
