Helping children strengthen and expand their emotional regulation skills is an important parental responsibility. It can also be tricky and awkward. Chandra Ghosh Ippen’s newest book, Holdin Pott again steps into the fray to serve up an important message: Don’t bottle up all those messy and uncomfortable feelings. Emotions kept wrapped too tightly eventually lead to explosions— messy ones, that create a lot of fallout for parent and child.
Holdin Pott explains that stifled emotions make “the body ache and the belly sicken.” Illustrator Erich Ippen Jr. captures the spirit of this message in a two-page spread that depicts the aftermath of a pressure cooker that has detonated. (Anyone who has faced this experience knows just how messy, loud and frightening it can be!)
The next line of text reads, “Then Little Pott felt ashamed and afraid he’d be in big trouble for the mess that he made.” Shame. Fear, Isolation— these complicated emotions make the child feel even worse. They weaken the child’s ability to process and cope with his challenges. Handling the hard stuff of life is hard enough for adults; for children with few the skills and limited experience, managing on their own is much more difficult. This is why they need to be able to turn to parents for guidance, understanding, and acceptance. To feel safe. Loved. Accepted.
Lucky is the child whose parents recognize this need and intentionally look for ways to create this secure attunement with their child and to grow their child’s emotional regulation skills. In fact, developing this competency benefits the entire family. Ippen’s book offers one great way to accomplish this goal.
I highly recommend her other, exceptional book, You weren’t with Me. I have gifted it to both children and adults and folks raved about how it helped them. Read my review of it.
AQ Lens: Adoption includes many intense emotions so a book like this which models that it is safe to express and share emotions makes a good addition to the adoptive family’s bookshelf. Adult adoptees report that they frequently wrestled with big, scary and unsettling emotions like anger and fear of rejections. They yearned for ways to share their fears with parents but often failed in their efforts and instead kept these overwhelming emotions bottled up.
A book like Holdin Pott can serve as a gateway to free expression, loving connection, and emotional competency.
Gayle H. Swift, co-founder of GIFT Family Services, author of: ABC, Adoption & Me; We’re Adopted, So What?; Reimagining Adoption: What Adoptees Seek from Families and Faith
