How Do I Talk To My Kids About Mental Health?

We adore The Crayons, and this adorable board book is the perfect book to help your youngest readers learn about feelings. Crayons love to color, a little-known fact is that they also have feelings. This fun board book is perfect choice to help kids both understand and express their feelings! 

Perfect to help kids learn how to lean into different breathing techniques in order to help them manage their feelings, worries, and more, this picture book will become a family favorite. With fun and unique names like “counting breaths,” “dandelion breaths,” and “balloon breaths,” these proven methods of yoga and mindfulness meditation will stick in kids’ minds as methods to help them through their days. 

We all know that stress is inevitable in life, but once you’ve lived in the world long enough, stress is inevitable. This picture book is perfect for any young kids who tend to have worries that grow and grow until it’s the only thing on their mind. It’s the perfect book to help talk about stressors and anxieties with your kid, and it’s just the book for kids like the “so gosh darn stressed” kid from TikTok to read! 

In this fantastic picture book, Katelyn Aronson and Eve Farb crafted a fun and highly effective story about confronting bullies and also your emotions. Every reader and listener will see a bit of themselves in Clovis (and also in his tormentors). Clovis Keeps His Cool is a great tool to help children work through common daily difficulties and build social-emotional resiliency. With how wonderful it is, we simply had to choose it for our Picture Book Shortlist for the 2022 Barnes and Noble Children’s Book Awards! 

This picture book is the perfect read for mental health awareness month and to talk to your kids about big feelings. All about depression, sensory awareness, and the power of listening, this book follows Coen who’s having a blue kind of day. His family each try to cheer him up, thinking they know just what he needs, but when nothing works, they begin to listen to Coen as he shows them exactly what he needs. 

For a great graphic novel that is all about worries and the way that can affect the body, check out Guts. It follows Raina who wakes up with a super upset stomach one night, but her mom has one too, so it’s probably just a bug. When she returns to school where she runs into all her stressors and worries, it becomes clear that her stomach problems aren’t going away. This book is an engaging, thoughtful, and funny story about growing up and finding courage.

This book is a great one to read together to discuss mental illness and familial responsibility. It follows Zinnia whose older brother Gabriel is diagnosed with a mental illness and flips her family on its head. Zinny’s mom and dad asked her and her siblings to keep Gabriel’s condition “private,” and Zinny struggles with feeling like that’s the same thing as a secret and she can’t betray it to anyone. When she gets the chance to attend a marine biology camp for the summer, Zinny feels conflicted about moving forward when Gabriel and her family still needs her help. A powerful story of growth and adapting, this book is a must-read! 

For a wonderful read involving a family road trip, an injury preventing Maisy from dancing, and moods full of anxiety and darkness, The Sea in Winter is perfect for readers who love books like The Thing About Jellyfish. Maisie’s family is wonderful and supportive, but any person who has loved a sport or an activity knows the heartache that comes when you have to stop for reasons out of your control. This book is full of heart and is thought-provoking, making it the ideal family read! 

If you’re looking for a book full of family and friendship that also has a main character with anxiety that results in hoarding, then look no further than Give and Take. When Maggie’s grandma died, she began collecting things and stuffing them in cardboard boxes under her bed to fill the giant hole in her heart, and then when her parents take in a foster infant, anxiety over the baby’s impending departure only worsens her hoarding, causing her to spiral. A touching read, this book is one that will linger in your mind long after you’ve finished reading.  

I absolutely adore this book for so many reasons, but one of the major ones is because of the way Happily Ever Afters addresses the mental stress creatives can put on themselves and the way it can cause a mental block hindering people from what they love to do. When Tessa gets into the creative writing program at a prestigious art school, she struggles to overcome writer’s block and embarks on an adventure to try to find her own real-life love story to inspire her. But, as she pursues that, she finds that she’s getting further from who she really is and risks losing everything she cares for. It’s the type of book to make you nose-crinklingly happy while also talking about things that often get swept under the rug.

For a book with spectacular OCD rep, you simply have to pick up the joy that is We Can’t Keep Meeting Like This! This delightful read follows Quinn and Tarek whose feelings towards each other are as intertwined as their families’ businesses. After a crush confession goes unanswered at the end of one summer, it’s only natural that the two would clash the next time they see each other a summer later. Quinn’s and Tarek’s story will keep you entertained while also providing excellent representation for mental health issues.  

This moving read will be one that you can’t put down. It’s about Biz who knows how to be fine, floating right on the surface with all the people who she has in her life. She doesn’t tell any of them about her dark thoughts, about kissing Grace or noticing the new boy, and definitely not about seeing her dad who died when she was seven. When something happens on the beach and rips the comfort of her father away, she begins to question how to move forward. This story of love, grief, and inter-generational mental illness will linger in your mind long after you’ve turned the last page.  

Darius hasn’t ever felt like he fits in, and his clinical depression doesn’t really help that at all. So, when he heads to Iran, he’s certain it’s going to be more of the same and explaining his medication to his grandparents makes everything harder. But when Darius meets the boy next door, Sohrab, he suddenly finds himself feeling more like himself than ever before. This beautiful debut will make you laugh and break your heart, and I can’t recommend it enough.  

This book provides a spectacular read in which mental illness is so intertwined in both the beauty and struggle of being a teen. Jonah’s life has always been full of constants until his father died. Then his mom has depression and he, along with his five siblings, is left struggling to keep their home and their dad’s restaurant afloat. Then Vivi comes to town. She lives big, refusing to let the medicine she’s told will make her feel better hold her down. Their story is one you won’t be able to put down, and it will let you feel every single emotion alongside Vivi and Jonah in the most beautiful of ways.