Article Title
Article Type
Issue Brief
Publication Date
2018-12-13
DOI
10.7191/parentandfamily.1009
Abstract
A parent’s struggle to manage their emotions may have significant impact on small children. Helping a child understand in the here and now about what is going on for the parent, without blaming that parent or the child, may be useful for the child. It may also lead the child to seek different models of managing emotions and self-concepts. Reading books with children, or bibliotherapy, could be useful for parents who experience stress-related “meltdowns” or perhaps live with mental health conditions such as borderline personality disorder, and for those working with small children in educational, child care or child protection settings. This brief uses Meltdown Moments, a picture-story book written by an experienced mental health clinician and illustrated by a professional artist with lived experience of emotional turmoil, as an example of what may help in conversations about what is going on in the family.
Keywords
Mental Health Literacy, Picture-Story Book, Children, Emotional Dysregulation, Borderline Personality Disorder, Families, Mental Health, Bibliotherapy, Mental Health Literacy, Intergenerational Mental Health
Acknowledgments
The excellent work of the artist, Marie Jonsson-Harrison, is acknowledged, and thanks to Janne McMahon, Chris Yelland, Sharron Hollamby, Gisele Apter, Rebecca Hill, and Simon Roberts-Thomson.
Recommended Citation
Sved Williams, A., & Jonsson-Harrison, M. (2018). Using Picture-Story Books to Help Families Understand Turbulent Parental Emotions in Families with Small Children. Journal of Parent and Family Mental Health, 3 (3). https://doi.org/10.7191/parentandfamily.1009. Retrieved from https://escholarship.umassmed.edu/parentandfamily/vol3/iss3/1
Rights and Permissions
Copyright © 2018 Sved Williams
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Included in
Family, Life Course, and Society Commons, Mental and Social Health Commons, Psychiatry Commons, Psychiatry and Psychology Commons, Psychology Commons
