By Chandra Ghosh Ippen
A squirrel admits that something frightening once happened to him, and one by one the other animals say it happened to them too, and that each of them reacted in a different way afterward.
A squirrel announces that he was once very, very scared. He expects to be the only one. He isn't. A turtle says it happened to him too, and he hid in his shell for a long time afterwards. A dog barked at everything. A monkey clung and wouldn't let go. An elephant felt ashamed and said nothing at all. A wise porcupine sits with all of them and helps them put words on what happened and what their bodies did about it. The scary thing itself is never named, on purpose. The animals mention wind, and people leaving, and people fighting, and somebody getting hurt, and the book leaves the specifics blank so your child can put their own thing in the gap. Chandra Ghosh Ippen is a child psychologist who helped build a treatment for young children who have been through something, and this book comes straight out of that work.
The thing this book does that almost nothing else does: it shows a child that the strange way they've been acting since the scary thing is the fear, not something wrong with them. A child who's been through something often doesn't say so. They might bark, or hide, or cling, or go silent, and decide that means something is broken in them specifically. Here are five animals doing exactly those five things, all from the same cause, all normal. Your child can point at the one that fits without saying a word about themselves. That's why therapists reach for it. It also hands a family plain language for what comes next: name it, tell somebody, notice what your body does.