Teach Children to Manage Their Anger and Grow from Mistakes.

Help children grow from mistakes.

Helping children deal with events to avoid un-necessary emotional scarring is difficult. Children aren't logical. They are highly impressionable and the emotional environment and emotional currents around events permeate their subconscious and affect them throughout life, or, it they're lucky, until they become conscious of their emotional patterns. A child scolded for hurting a friend's feelings can feel like a bad person, and later in life, feel intense guilt when a similar event occurs. A child can feel like a failure after making a mistake, and when older, may feel undeserving of the joy and delights of life. These emotional patterns are sadly common but avoidable with emotional education.

I started the "Prickly Porcupine" series to shed light on emotions and to help children deal with issues they are bound to encounter. In Prickly Porcupine Sees a Psychologist, Pat spectacularly ruins his friend's birthday party and feels so ashamed of himself that he doesn't eat his favorite cookies. He ignores the box of treats in his room. He soon learns, however, that even the supreme disaster he unintentionally caused, does not make him an awful person. Dr. Owl puts the incident into perspective and teaches Pat to make amends and improve. Pat thus learns that mistakes are a part of life and instead of giving into eviscerating and enervating guilt, he learns to forgive himself and respond constructively to the mess he made. The story is light and humorous so that children will enjoy reading it and learn to respond to life in a way that promotes healthy emotional development, and grow into the positive and kind people we like to meet.