Validation. It’s the big buzz word floating around these days, especially in parenting classes. Children, we’re told, need to have their feelings validated. There is no such thing as a silly or inconsequential feeling, no “right” or “wrong” way to feel, and children need to be reassured of this; they need to know that we understand and respect their feelings, regardless of what we choose to actually do about them.

That’s not to say it’s easy to do this. When your child throws a tantrum because the Lego city he was working on was taken apart and put away when he left the room, chances are you’re not in the mood of validating his feelings, at least not right then. If you’re human, like me, you may even feel like telling him, “Stop making such a big deal over nothing!”

But—who said being a good parent is easy? So, you take a deep breath, mutter, “Validation. Validation,” to yourself, and then go and give your son a giant hug, telling him, “It’s hard when something we work so hard on, gets destroyed, isn’t it?”

Of course, you can always pull Why Things Come to an End off the shelf, too, and read your son a story about another little boy whose beautiful Lego palace got dismantled, and the way his mother dealt with it. After all, why re-invent the wheel and stress about how to deal with the situation, if you can use another mother’s perfectly good words of wisdom instead?

Why Things Come to an End is one of the 4 brand new children’s books in the Story Solution series. This series was written and illustrated by Esti Hess, a talented artist who is also a student of Bibliotherapy (a fancy way of saying a method that uses stories to heal hearts). The common denominator among all the books in this series is the fact that all of them (7 colorful stories in total) touch on basic childhood challenges and validate specific feelings that children often have, offering young readers a deep sense of being understood.

If you already have the first 3 Story Solutions books that were released last year, you’ll be excited to see these 4 new ones:Why Things Come to an End; My Baby Sister; When Mommy Is Tired; and The Day I Got Lost.

Click here to purchase online.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2015 at 3:35 pm and is filed under General, New Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.