Therapeutic Children’s Book Options:

 

Abuse

● I said No? A Kid-to-Kid Guide to Keeping Private Parts Private by Zach and Kimberly King

○ Ages 4-8

○ Helps: understand boundaries, uses “red flag” and “green flag” language

Adoption

Anger:

  • Ages: 4-7 years
  • Helps: Personifies and identifies feelings of anger and works on calming skills.
  • Ages: 3-8 years
  • Helps: Similar to above, Identifying and labeling feelings to help move forward in coping skills
  • Ages: 3-6 years
  • Helps: Children identify positive coping mechanisms
  • Ages: 4-8 years
  • Helps: Children calm down when they feel angry
  • Ages: 11+ years
  • Helps: Shows how to recognize feelings of anger, discusses how angry feelings are created, and suggests ways to calm down and deal with the emotion.
  • Ages: 6-12 years
  • Helps: Engaging examples, lively illustrations, and step-by-step instructions teach children a set of "anger dousing" methods aimed at cooling angry thoughts and controlling angry actions, resulting in calmer, more effective kids. A complete resource for educating, motivating, and empowering children to work toward change.
  • 35 simple ways to deal with anger

Anxiety:

  • Ages: 3-8
  • Helps: describes anxiety and how it can grow, teaches how to take charge of anxiety
  • Ages: 4-8
  • Helps: illustrates how worry can impact daily life function and how to change this “little by little”
  • Ages: 3-6
  • Helps: Identify a worry and where it might come from, as well as provides them with helpful tools to reduce and cope with worries.
  • Ages: 6-10
  • Helps: “Cognitive behavioral techniques most often used in the treatment of anxiety. A resource for educating, motivating and empowering kids to overcome their overgrown worries”
  • Ages: 4-7
  • Helps: Children identify when they’re getting anxious, out of focus or dysregulated and teaches them skills they can use to center themselves anywhere
  • Ages: 3-6
  • Helps: Identify when and why children might have disruptive or inappropriate behaviors around getting attention and how they can identify why they want the attention in the specific moment and address better ways of receiving it. 
  • Ages: 4-8 years  
  • Helps: Actively involves young people in fun, memorable stories and teaches them to become lifelong problem solvers.
  • Ages: 5-9 years
  • Helps: Provide children with things to calm them  down and places to put their worries on paper. It is a book full of mindfulness activities
  • Ages: 5-11 years
  • Helps: Engage children to learn about self-awareness, skills for coping with anxiety, and resilience & confidence.
  • Ages: 9-13 years
  • Helps: Both children and parents whose worries can get the best of them. This book unmasks worry and shows kids how to manage worry throughout their day.
  • Ages: 8-12 years
  • Helps: Raise awareness of differences and promotes acceptance
  • Ages: 10-14 years
  • Helps: Explain what anxiety is and teach individuals how to live life with anxiety and stop avoiding it.
  • Ages: 3-6 years
  • Helps: Children with anxiety. It helps children understand that worries can be normal, other people have them too, but they can also get out of hand if you don't deal with them properly.
  • Ages: 3-7 years
  • Helps: Children overcome their fear/anxiety of the dark
  • A fun CBT skills activity book to help manage worries and fears
  • Ages 5-9
  • A guide for caregivers

ADHD:

  • Ages: 4-8 years
  • Helps: Children understand and regulate their urges to interrupt others.
  • Ages: 4-7 years
  • Helps: Children identify when they’re getting anxious, out of focus or dysregulated and teaches them skills they can use to center themselves anywhere.  
  • Ages 4-6 years
  • Helps: This is a story about sensory differences and how some children experience their world, told from a child's perspective. This book is for anyone who has ever felt the need for a wiggle, stomp, or squeeze!
  • Ages: 4-7 years
  • Helps: A student's positive journey through a learning difference that offers an encouraging example of triumph over difficulty.
  • Ages: 5-8 years
  • Helps: Children, parents, and teachers teach kids about ADHD and how to get organized, focus and succeed in life.
  • Ages: 12-17 years
  • Helps: Give teens the tools to understand how ADHD works within their body, and actionable ways that they can use it to their advantage.
  • Supporting teens’ Academic Needs Daily (STAND): A Parent-Adolescent Collaborative Intervention for ADHD by Sibley

Autism:

  • Ages: 6-10 years
  • Helps: Describes day-to-day experience of high-functioning children with ASD
  • Ages: 8-12 years
  • Helps: Per Child Mind Institute-not a book that is obviously about autism.
  • Ages: 13+ years
  • Helps: Parents of children with ASD and children/teens with ASD. Autoethnography: written by a 13 year-old with ASD talks about life and experience.
  • Ages: 8-11+ years
  • Helps: Teach children about social thinking, social regulation, and social problem solving through a playing a game.

Bullying/Friendship:

  • Ages: 6-9 years
  • Helps: distinguish between teasing and bullying
  • Ages: 5-10 years
  • Helps: distinguish between teasing and bullying and teach strategies for responding to both good-natured teasing and bullying.
  • Ages: 8-12 years
  • Helps: Discusses bullying, relatable story for kids who feel like outsider

Bystander by James Preller (Ages 10 and up)

  • Ages: 8+ years
  • Helps: describe changes in friendship, bullying, childhood anxiety
  • Ages: 5-8 years
  • Helps: Teach how small acts of kindness can help children feel included and allow them to flourish
  • Ages: 8+ years
  • Helps: A series that educates about how hard it is to find your real friends and why it’s worth the journey.
  •  

Children Books (picture books):

Consent/Body Autonomy:

  • Ages: 5-10 years
  • Helps: Educate about consent and holding/respecting boundaries, through a comic style book.

  • Ages: 4-8 years
  • Helps: understand boundaries, uses “red flag” and “green flag” language
  • Ages: 3-7 years
  • Helps: Spark discussions about bodily autonomy and consent with young kids

Divorce:

  • Ages: 8 - 12 years
  • Helps: Give insight and understanding to children trying to cope with family marital issues.
  • Ages: 8-14 years
  • Helps: Deals with tough issues, and addresses questions that are uppermost in the minds of children whose parents are divorced or divorcing.
  • Ages: 2 - 6 years
  • Helps: Teach about divorce, and receive age-appropriate explanations of what is happening regarding such issues as single-parent homes and joint custody.
  • Ages: 3-7 years
  • Helps: Children identify the emotions and experiences associated with divorce.
  •            Parents advice on ways to explain these emotions to children
  • Ages: 4-8 years
  • Helps: Young children and their families deal with the confusion, misconceptions, and anxieties that are apt to arise when divorce occurs.

Dyslexia:

  • Ages: 4-8 years
  • Helps: Explains dyslexia and models how to ask for help
  • Ages: 8-12 years
  • Helps: Explains dyslexia, models how to ask for help and captures how can impact self-esteem

Eating Disorders:

Feelings:

  • Ages: 3-6 years
  • Helps: Describes each emotion
  • Ages: 4-8 years
  • Book about overcoming fears, how does Humpty Dum
  • pty get back up again?
  • Ages: 3-8 years
  • Book to help explore feelings for children
  • Ages: 3-7 years
  • Helps: Children identify and describe feelings
  • Ages: 3-7 years
  • Helps: Teach children how to deal with and approach “big” emotions
  • Ages: 3-6 years
  • Helps: Kids especially during times of separation, whether starting school, entering daycare, or going to camp.
  • Ages: 6-12 years
  • Helps: Children lower anxiety and stress levels through a variety of activities and worksheets.
  • Ages: 3-7 years
  • Helps: Children who are navigating feelings and coping with an array of emotions.
  • Ages: 3-7 years
  • Helps: Foster creativity and uniqueness in children
  • A kid’s guide to overcoming anxiety
  • A kid’s guide to accepting imperfection

Grief and Loss:

  • Ages: 4-8 years
  • Helps: Explain why people die and how hard it can be to say goodbye
  • Ages: 4-8 years
  • Helps: Show change from struggling to recovery and places an emphasis using support networks
  • Ages: 3-5 years
  • Helps: Describe feelings around loss, does not describe death
  • Ages: 3+ years
  • Helps: A child feel connected to a loved one who cannot physically be with them.
  • Ages: 6-10 years
  • Helps: Any adult helping a child cope with the loss of a loved one and working through grief.
  • Ages: 3-8 years
  • Helps: Family explain life and death in a sensitive, caring, beautiful way.

Identity/Self-Esteem:

  • Ages: 5-10 years
  • Helps: Describe labeling in social settings
  • Ages: 4-8 years
  • Picture book for children about non-binary gender identities
  • Ages: 4-8 years
  • Short, subtle but lovely and sweet picture book about a child who is non-gender conforming.
  • Ages: 4-8 years
  • Picture book about diversity and difference
  • Ages: 3-7 years
  • Helps: Describe diversity and differences
  • Ages: 3-8 years
  • Helps: Describe differences, compassion and supporting those with differences.
  • Ages: 4-8 years
  • Helps: Portrays everyday situations in which children see themselves as "different" in family life, preferences, and aptitudes, and yet, feel that being different is all right.
  • Ages: 4 and up
  • Helps children understand changes that come with death
  • Ages: 7-12 years
  • Helps: Talk about individual differences and normalize being yourself

Mindfulness:

  • Ages: 3 years and younger
  • Helps: Normailze the messiness of life. The book has sparse text and family scenes from a diverse group of people break expected stereotypes and celebrate the messiness of life.
  • Ages: 4-10 years
  • Helps: 30 breathing and mindfulness techniques for managing bodies, breath, and emotions.  

OCD:

  • Ages: 9-14 years
  • Helps: Describe OCD tendencies and how support could be provided.
  • Ages: 7-12 years
  • Helps: Describe OCD tendencies and how support could be provided.
  • A kid’s guide to overcoming OCD

Parenting:

  • Helps: Guide parents who are struggling with their children’s behavioral tendencies.
  • Ages: 4-8 years
  • Helps: Talk about the role dads play in raising kids

Parent with Depression:

  • Ages: 3-8 years
  • Helps: Children understand their parent’s depression in an age appropriate manner. It reassures that the child is still loved and depression isn’t their fault. It also goes over and explains some of the symptoms that they might be able to see like loss of appetite or sleep.
  • Ages: 2-5 years
  • Helps: Children understand why their parent might be away from home and in a hospital for any chronic illness.
  • Ages: 5-6 years
  • Helps: Children who are worried about their parent’s chronic illness or mental health and how to identify and be with those feelings surrounding the situation.

Puberty/Development:

  • Ages:  8-11 years
  • Helps: Body positive, empowering book for girls that informs about puberty, emotions and relationships
  • Ages: 8-12 years
  • Helps: Educate teens about their changing body, from hair care to healthy eating, bad breath to bras, periods to pimples, and everything in between.
  • Ages: 9-12 years
  • Helps: Discuss sex, sexuality, bodies, and puberty for new generations
  • Ages: 9-12 years
  • Helps: provide boys going through puberty with the answers that will help them take care of themselves, from hair care to healthy eating, bad breath to shaving, acne to voice changes, and everything in between.  
  • Ages: 9-12 years
  • Helps: Empower adolescent boys with honest answers to all of their questions about what's really going on down there.

Responsibility:

  • Ages: 5-8 years
  • Helps: Children learn how to accept responsibility for their own behavior
  • Ages: 8-12 years
  • Helps: Give advice on what should be done in confusing, ambiguous, dangerous, or unexpected situations at home, school, or out on your own.

Selective Mutism:

  • Ages: 5-8 year
  • Helps: Describe how kids can be verbal at home but not in public

Sensory Processing:

  • Ages: 8-12 years
  • Helps: Explain how sensory sensitivities and anxiety can impact daily life function

Sleep:

  • Ages: 6-12 years
  • Helps: Guide children and their parents through the cognitive-behavioral techniques used to treat problems with sleep.
  • Ages: 4-8 years
  • Helps: Normalize bedtime challenges for parents and children.

Tourette’s Syndrome:

  • Ages: 8-12 years
  • Helps: Explain tourette’s syndrome and how it can impact self esteem
  • Ages: 12+ years
  • Helps: Give insight into living with disability, discusses syndrome and types of treatments

Trauma/Neglect:

  • Ages: 5-9 Year
  • Helps: Discuss trauma and the importance of talking about traumatic things
  • Ages: 6-12 years
  • Helps: Explain how neglect can feel and describes how social worker and therapist may intervene
  • Ages: 3-12 years
  • Helps: Parents and children talk about difficult separations to help them reconnect and how they can find their way back to each other.

Other:

  • Ages: 4-7 years
  • Helps: Talk about and normalize the discussion of food insecurity
  • Ages: 5-7 years
  • Helps: Children practice the alphabet and to introduce young children to kindergarten.

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