It's OK to Cry
*£10.99
Pros
- An important book helping younger children to understand and verbalise their feelings.
- Explores positive and negative feelings, and strategies that children can use to cope with them.
- Challenges negative comments and behaviours from adults, but offers support to parents, carers and teachers on how to adapt language used mainly with boys.
- Focus on boys, although girls will benefit from exploring their emotions, and how others might behave.
- Could be used as part of a PSHE curriculum, helping young people develop their emotional intelligence.
Supported by Bloomsbury Education
- Book challenges popular emotionally damaging sayings.
- Aimed at children aged between 5 and 10 years of age.
- Helps children understand the language around emotions and feelings.
- Explores challenging issues as to why some boys hide their emotions.
- View book on Amazon UK (click here)
The old adage beholds that ‘boys don’t cry’, and that you should ‘man up’ when feeling upset. Repressing our emotions is now understood to be destructive to our mental health (whether for males or females), although many of the phrases mentioned are still evident in many societies as they are perceived to be a sign of weakness.
Challenging such harmful language and recognising that our emotions are a natural way of dealing with situations in our lives is at the heart of “It’s OK to Cry”, a book aimed at helping young children understand their feelings, recognise that they are a perfectly normal part of being human, and what to do when confronted with uncomfortable feelings.
Molly Potter explores challenging issues such as why some boys hide their emotions, why boys think they need to act tough, and why it’s good to talk about feelings. The picture book, aimed at children aged 5-10 years of age, also introduces language focused on giving young people words that can help label their feelings, positive and negative. The book helps children to explore steps they can take to help deal with uncomfortable feelings, along with things they can do to help them cope with such emotions – all apart of helping build strong emotional intelligence that will support them as they continue to grow and develop.
The book does mainly focus on boys and how they can hide their emotions (often with negative consequences), however, girls will also benefit from the emotions and behaviours explored as they build a vocabulary to help support understanding feelings. Guidance is also offered (at the rear section of the book) for parents, carers and teachers on helping boys become emotionally intelligent, helping children understand that all emotions are part of being human and cannot be avoided.
Resources:
- You can Download an activity pack to help children understand their emotions while at home during a lockdown.
- For older students, explore BBC Bitesize’s “Boys don’t cry (and other lies about mental health)” online resource.
*RRP Price, correct at time of publication.
You need to Login or Register to bookmark/favorite this content.
Be the first to comment