Whether you’re 3 or 36, communicating about feelings can be hard. When we created the Emotional Well-Being Collection, our goal was to help little ones get a head start on coping with and understanding big feelings. But, as we know by our experience as a therapist and an educator —you can’t start coping with feelings until you learn how to identify them.

We are thrilled to introduce our newest board book, Creatures Full of Feelings, which invites children to recognize and identify a full range of emotions. We wanted to create a board book with all of our beloved creatures that is the perfect introduction to emotional wellness for any age.

It’s no secret that being able to recognize facial expressions are the first step toward emotion identification. That’s why our latest book is filled with the familiar faces of your child’s favorite Slumberkins friends, each one demonstrating a different feeling. Through the process of identifying emotions via verbal and non-verbal cues, children learn to develop empathy—a crucial component of emotion identification.

Creatures Full of Feelings is special to me for a few reasons, including the fact we’re releasing it on my birthday! As a former special education teacher, emotion identification was central to my work with children navigating and building social-emotional skills. Going back to my own childhood, I’m so thankful I had a mother that did everything she could to help boost my self-esteem, knowing I was destined to be very tall (She was right, I’m 6’2”). (Read about how my experience as a tall kid formed the foundation for Bigfoot.) But, one thing I’m realizing now as a mother with a daughter with the same destiny is how important it is to take it one step further and proactively identify and talk about different emotions she will face to give her the advantage of learning how to take care of them. 

I’ve learned and I’m still learning that through building a strong sense of emotional awareness, we can set up our children to be empowered when facing difficult emotions and use that to understand themselves and the world better.  Learn more about the importance of emotional regulation and the tools to help you raise confident, caring, and resilient children.

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