Depression and anxiety in young children: picturebooks that help
By Shoshana Magnet
“For nothing was simply one thing”
–Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse.
That is one of my favourite quotes – it seems to me to be in praise of ambiguity. To me, it speaks deeply of the paradoxical nature of parenthood. So many moments simultaneously endless and fleeting, every stage agonizingly slow and then over all too soon.
One of my profound needs during this challenging time is to both make and find meaning in its attendant sadnesses. One of the paradoxical things about grief is that it can bring us together – it can lead us to what writer Susan Cain, in her beautiful book Bittersweet, calls “a union of souls.” Speaking of how we all contain such deep longings, Cain describes how they are often connected to sadness, to yearning, and how these feelings of great aches for what she calls the “unreachable perfect world” can happen through art, music, nature. The places we yearn for have many names: from “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” to “Home” to, as Cain notes “the novelist Mark Merlis puts it, ‘the shore from which we were deported before we were born’.” And grief can transport us to those places together – in sharing grief and yearning, we can connect, because “The place you suffer…is the same place you care profoundly – care enough to act.” These portals are everywhere: a glowing raindrop or a haunting melody – all of these can serve as gateways to that for which we long. For me, the gateway to my “perfect, unreachable world” is picturebooks. Picturebooks are art objects: they are collections of paintings and poems, and they are tributes to complexity that are helping me personally to make meaning out of this difficult time.
The Red Tree, by Shaun Tan
I include this book because it does the best imaginable job of explaining some of the characteristics of anxiety and depression to young children.
Sometimes the day begins with nothing to look forward to and things go from bad to worse. I see it in the children around me. A case of the Sunday night blues, or a case of the Mondays. Unexpected tears and a general sense of ennui. They wake up with difficulty and kind of lie around looking demoralized. What a contrast to the Saturday wake up! The Red Tree is there to remind us that sometimes the world can feel like a cruel machine “without sense or reason,” or that “sometimes you wait and wait and wait and wait and wait, but nothing ever happens.” Sometimes it seems as if “you just don’t know what you are supposed to do or who you are meant to be.” It’s true, isn’t it? For all of us who experience grief and big sadness (which is to say, all of us), here is the book that makes a person feel very seen. Also, in the tradition of hopefulness and earnestness that I so appreciate in children’s picturebooks, The Red Tree reminds us that suddenly there it is right in front of you, quietly waiting just as you imagined it would be.
Out of a Jar, by Deborah Marcero
Out of a Jar explains how when we shut down our grief, we also shut down our joy. “Anxiety is sublimated grief,” said my brilliant therapist of 20 years. It starts with Llewelyn, a little bunny who likes scary movies and scary costumes but doesn’t like feeling afraid. He puts his fear in a jar and then takes it down, down, down some stairs to a sort of basement to “lock it away,” and “that was that.”
Each uncomfortable feeling that Llewelyn has – loneliness, disappointment, grief – all these go in jars too. In keeping with the strange truth that being happy is as vulnerable as being sad (in fact, people struggling with addiction are as likely to use when they are feeling really up as they are when feeling really down), even Llewelyn’s joy and excitement seem to overwhelm the people around him. And all too soon, “Llewelyn walked around feeling not much of anything at all.”
This is one of the things that scares me about raising sons. Please let them continue to feel. Delight, grief, disappointment, loneliness and joy. Let them never be told to “walk it off” or not to cry. I fear the comfortably numb fog of toxic masculinity.
When Llewelyn is shamed in front of the class, “He tried not to show it but that just made it worse” and “Something rumbled deep inside of him.” All of those feelings “broke loose and pummeled Llewelyn with a stampede that turned him into a ragged heap of bunny onto the floor.” And yet, after his feelings return, something “happened that Llewelyn did not expect.” He feels more than one thing at once: he was “happy and sad” or “excited and worried.” Llewelyn musters the courage to feel and share his feelings, and “when he was ready, to look each feeling in the eye, give it a hug, and let it go.” And, friends, “that, really was that.”
Shoshana Magnet is a professor at the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies at the University of Ottawa.
