When I was offered a free copy of the book Liking Myself by Pat Palmer and UpLiftPress I jumped at the chance. Jason, my 5 year old, tends to have some issues with his emotions. I don’t know if it is not being able to understand them and therefore he has trouble with self expression, but I knew it was something we needed to work on. Liking Myself takes children through a journey on their feelings. It speaks to children in their own language and has activities they can do in order to feel good about themselves. Liking Myself not only speaks to children in their own language, but it is actually written by hand with pictures to illustrate feelings. As mentioned above, my son is only 5 but he can understand this book with no issue.
“Talking about feelings hurts no one” is one of the activities in this book. I appreciate that Jason is learning at a young age how to deal with people who have hurt him. Rather than placing the blame on the other person and making them defensive, he is learning to use “I” in place of “you” so that the confrontation ends on a positive note.
Another activity in the book that I found useful was understanding that “not everyone has to like you.” I’m 30 this year and I still struggle with this. If someone doesn’t like me it eats away at me, I feel like such a failure. Liking Myself asks the child to write down a list of people that don’t have to like you but can still work with you. Examples are the doctor and the baker. Learning to let go of that guilt at a young age will help him so much in the future. I know I personally walked around with a migraine for 25 years worrying about people who didn’t like me. Only recently have I been able to honestly say, “I don’t care.”
Liking Myself is filled with 76 pages of really helpful activities to educate your child on getting to know themselves, learning to love themselves, living life with a step up on dealing with the good and the bad and being assertive. I plan on showing this book to Jason’s pre school teachers because I think all small children could benefit from it. Honestly I benefited from it as well. Many of the exercises were learning experiences for me.
You can also check out The Mouse, the Monster And Me by Pat Palmer. This book is for children 8 and up and focuses on aggressive and passive personality traits. It is a lot like Liking Myself but for children a bit older.
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sounds like a cool book.