Almost Always Best Friends

picture books social emotional skills May 22, 2022

Picture Books for Big Feelings: Almost Always Best Friends by Apryl Stott

Jealousy, Worries, Anger, Frustration, & Guilt 

"Kids often feel jealous and betrayed when a best friend gets another friend."  Dr Eileen Kennedy-Moore of Psychology Today 

Jealousy is one of the trickier emotions to tackle with children because it's so layered.

This is a beautiful story with stunning illustrations that does a really amazing job of addressing some of those layered feelings we experience: jealousy, worry, anger, frustration, and guilt. There's also a really important message about feelings and friendship and what true friendship means when it comes to making mistakes and doing unkind things.

My favourite books are the ones that have tools and strategies for problem solving big feelings built right into them.

Apryl Stott doesn’t disappoint with her second book featuring important life skills for social emotional well-being.

In this story Poppy takes us on a journey while she tackles her big feelings of jealousy because her best friend Clementine has made a new friend and this makes her question their friendship and sends her into some serious ‘whatif’ thinking.

One of the things I really appreciate about this book is how Poppy processes her anger feelings with a dance party and a counting tool but, eventually those jealousy feelings still come out and she loses her cool on her friend with an unkind ‘shout.’ Sometimes no matter how many tools we try our feelings come out as unkindness. Unfortunately, jealousy feelings really can build up inside us when we try to push them away like Poppy did. The tools didn’t work, because she wasn’t fixing the problem => jealousy and whatif feelings.

Now here’s the really important part, Poppy next seeks out her dad who first makes space for her feelings and then helps her to see that the solution to her problem is talking to her friend about those jealousy feelings. He helps her practice how to talk to her friend, while also reinforcing what true friendship looks like. True friends are the ones who accept you for your feelings and work through them with you to heal the friendship. Poppy feels really uncomfortable with her jealousy feelings and also how she acted when she had those feelings => yelling and storming away. As a parent it can be tempting to see the problem as the yelling with a solution of apologizing, but there is a deeper layer here.

One of the things I teach in Building Resilience Through Kindness is how apologies aren’t solutions to problems, but they are an important part of fixing unkindness and problem solving parent clues for missing skills. In this story, Poppy is like most children learning to navigate social emotional skills. She knows she needs to use some tools for the big and obvious feelings. So she tries them, but they don’t work. The reason they don’t work is they didn’t get at the feeling underneath, the real problem that needed to be solved => jealousy and guilt feelings.

For some super cool printables to go along with this book, be sure to check out Apryl Stott's website.

 

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