Some children lie awake running through everything that could go wrong, ask the same question nine times, are soothed by none of the nine answers, and feel it in their stomach every school morning. They are not all the same kind of object, and that's the thing to know before you spend any money: three of them are stories, four are lessons dressed up in bright colors, and one is a workbook your child writes in with a pencil over several weeks. Ruby Finds a Worry is a good place to start if you want a story. The rest you pick by what your child is actually like.
Sort these into three piles before you choose, because a parent who buys the wrong kind of object here wastes an evening and some money. FIRST, the stories. Ruby Finds a Worry, The Whatifs, and Guts are books where a person has a worry and something happens to them. Ruby and The Whatifs are the two on this shelf with real craft in them — Percival drains the color out of the pages as Ruby's Worry swells and floods it back when she finally says it out loud, and Persico draws the Whatifs clinging to Cora so tenderly you almost like them. Those two would be good books if they were about anything. They're the ones to reach for if your child reads for story. SECOND, the lessons. A Little SPOT of Anxiety, Hey Warrior, Is a Worry Worrying You?, and Wilma Jean the Worry Machine are, underneath the illustrations, a technique being handed to your child. There's no story to speak of; a character or a blob explains something and gives them a tool. That is a completely legitimate thing for a book to be, and some children want exactly this — the answer, plainly, no plot to sit through. Hey Warrior is the pick for the older child who wants to know what their body is doing and finds feelings books babyish. Wilma Jean names the sore stomach and the fast heart better than anything else here. Is a Worry Worrying You? gets in through jokes, which sometimes reaches a child who stiffens at earnest. A Little SPOT names avoidance, which is what most anxious children are doing and almost nothing else mentions. THIRD, and on its own: What to Do When You Worry Too Much is a workbook. Your child writes in it. It has exercises and twenty chapters and it takes weeks, and it needs you sitting next to them for ten minutes at a stretch. It is not a bedtime read and it will not work if it lives on a shelf. It's the most useful thing here for the family who will actually do it, and dead weight for the family who won't — decide honestly which one you are. And Guts is the odd one out in a different way: two hundred pages of graphic memoir for an eight-to-twelve-year-old, a real commitment next to a thirty-two-page picture book, and the only one where anxiety belongs to a real person who lived it.