Children's Books For Tough Conversations
April 2026
April was a tough month for our family, but it came at a time when our four-year-old is really starting to get excited about learning from books. It has been exciting to see how well children's books are helping with some of these challenging conversations.
Early in the month, Ish and Beautiful Oops! helped us coach our son to build confidence in his art skills. A few weeks later, our cat passed away after 13 years as a beloved member of our family, and books like Chip guided us through a lot of difficult conversations about phases of life and death.
The Easy Stuff - Rockets, Animals, and Reading Rainbow
We recently inherited some hand-me-down children's encyclopedias from the 90's, and we've been taking them everywhere. On a recent family trip to the zoo, we brought the animal encyclopedia and looked up each of the animals we saw. While we watched the Artemis II rocket launch, we looked through a space encyclopedia - it had a great illustration of rocket stages and we talked through each stage of the launch as it happened.
And on weekend mornings, we've been watching old episodes of Reading Rainbow:
Some favorite episodes have been about types of weather and animal habitats. This realization that we can learn things from books has been really exciting, and it laid the groundwork for tougher lessons we needed to learn, too.
Self-Confidence
My son developed a huge complex about drawing - he really wanted to draw pictures but was very critical of his skills. This led to a few big meltdowns and lots of tears. To help, I went out and bought two books:
We loved both, and we read them a bunch of times. Ish was especially helpful - it's about a kid who is critical of his drawing skills until his little sister says that she loves one of his drawings of a flower because it's "flower-ish." He discovers that he can add the word "ish" to anything that he wants to draw, and that new perspective takes away all the stress. One favorite example from the book was a drawing of a "fish-ish".
My son embraced this mindset immediately. About a day later he came running up to me and said "Look daddy - I drew an ish fire truck". Since then, he's been drawing non-stop =)
Death and Aging
Our family cat, Jelly Bean Jones, passed away this month. She had been sick for a while, so we knew it was coming. One of the parts that I was dreading the most was the impact that the death would have on my child and how we would talk to him about it. Books made a huge difference in that process, too.
Before the death, we spent a lot of time reading and talking about this book:
Which deals with aging. When we put the cat to sleep, we checked out a few books from the library but found that we liked Chip the best:
It does a great job of keeping the conversation light, and sparking questions about what happens to pets after they die (a challenging topic in our non-religious home). We also checked out a book called The Tenth Good Thing About Barney which I enjoyed but would be more appropriate for older kids.
Problem Solving
Parents can lean things from books, too!
We've had a few tricky behavior issues recently, and we've had great success following a technique called "problem solving" that I learned form this parenting book:
"Problem Solving" involves sitting down for a discussion at a time when emotions are calm (we've used dinner time), discussing the challenge, and working together to brainstorm solutions. I'll leave the full description of the process to the book, but we've found that it's very powerful. One key part is writing down clear descriptions of the problem from everyone's perspective, and all of the ideas without any judgement. Even though my child is too young to read, I can tell that he appreciates having his ideas written down and read outloud. This process is summarized in this quote from the book that I really appreciated:
“The key word is respect—for my child, for myself, and for the unlimited possibilities of what can happen when two people of good will put their heads together.”
I'm proud of my growing family for putting our heads together and for finding such helpful resources to get us through the good times and the hard times =)