How books support children to understand and process feelings

Now obviously, there are books like, ooh, let me think, I don’t know, Ruby’s Worry, Meesha Makes Friends, or Sammy Feels Shy, that explicitly focus on emotional health and wellbeing.

But all books generate an emotional response, even a book that might not immediately seem to be about feelings. For example, a manual on how to fix your car can bring about a positive emotional outcome.

So it could be a football programme. It could be a comic, a history book, the sleeve notes on the back of a record. It could be anything.

My mum read to me loads when I was a kid. Not the Haynes manual for our Vauxhall Viva, to be fair. But books that she loved. And that is 100% what set me off on the path to becoming a fiction writer.

So nearly all books are about feelings, because nearly all books feature characters who experience a wide range of emotions, whether it’s joy, despair, love, hope, anger, jealousy, revenge…

I’m not sure if that last one’s an actual emotion. I certainly haven’t done a Big Bright Feelings book about it… yet.

But whenever we read, we’re broadening our emotional palate. We’re learning more about the world, more about each other, and more about ourselves.

A key benefit of picture books specifically is that they’re a shared medium. An adult and a child reading together side by side, focusing on the same thing at the same time.

And a picture book could bond you through laughter. Maybe it helps you build connections around a theme or a topic that you both love.

They can also be the perfect way to tackle a problem; a gentle way to start a difficult conversation, or maybe a sideways step into a topic that the child might not want to discuss directly, but is happy to talk about when it’s happening to a character in a story.

Sometimes you’re reading specifically because you need help coping with particular feelings in your own life. You might watch how a character takes on a challenge, and then you can apply it to your own situation.

That’s certainly true in the Big Bright Feelings books. I put my characters into situations that I know a lot of people will struggle with, and then I model a clear way through so that the children get a fun story and a clear idea to help them start tackling their own challenges.

It’s kind of like a ​‘stealth-help’ series!

Books can also be a huge comfort. You could discover a character who looks, thinks, acts or feels like you, which is really reassuring and can make you feel less alone.

So this is a huge part of why diversity in books is so important. We all need to see characters like us to validate our whole experience of life – to make us feel present, seen, and valued in the world.

Books also offer a genuine opportunity to spend time inside another person’s head, whether that’s a fictional character or whether you’re reading a non-fiction book where you feel like you’re almost having a conversation with the author.

One of the big problems with real life is that we only ever see people’s immediate reactions, their obvious likes and dislikes, and we never really know why they might say or do the things that they do. We have to work that all out for ourselves, which is hard.

But in books it’s just all laid out for you, making everything loads easier. And that in turn helps us to understand the people around us a little better, too.