Our Mission

Terrific Toddlers, Written For and About Toddlers

With this series, we set out to give toddlers a literature of their very own, one that sees and accepts them as they really are, in all their emotional and behavioral glory. And so we have written a series that addresses the hot-button issues facing toddlers, mirroring their real-life, daily emotional experiences in simple stories with recognizable characters and familiar settings using clean, spare yet lyrical language. Both pleasurable and socially purposeful, the stories support these youngest of children and their caregivers, captivating both.

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Our approach marries good storytelling for toddlers with cutting edge child development research. Small children are awash in feeling; they are the most confused and upset by their emotions at the very moment in their development when they have the fewest mental resources to understand or express them. They are immensely reassured when their feelings are accurately and empathically acknowledged. This enables them to develop the understanding and vocabulary necessary to handle these feelings. However, few books tell great stories for toddlers concerning how they feel about the ups and downs and lack of control they have in their lives. And so we’ve written a series of books that toddlers love and want to hear again and again and again...and again.

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As for the grownups: When children feel their experiences to be validated, parents’ ability to manage their children’s daily experiences becomes far easier. The subtle modeling through storytelling in our books has parents, caregivers, educators and therapists clamoring for them as much as the toddlers do.

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In our work with children – Carol as an innovative and sought-after early childhood specialist and Rhona as a published author and parent – we have searched for children’s books that relate directly and empathically to every toddler’s daily emotional experience.

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• There exist some that nicely address particular life events of toddlers (such as toileting or bedtime). But we have gone two important steps further, creating books that use simple storytelling to 1) address the emotional experience of the toddlers from their own point of view; and 2) depict effective strategies for the adults involved.
   

• And very importantly, those books that do address the issues we present in this series often use too many words and thus must be pared down on the spot by the reader in order to hold the toddler’s attention. And so we have written this series with language spare enough for toddlers to grasp – and they do!

Our market research has shown that toddlers find themselves in these books and, quite simply, love them. Furthermore, we have found that parents enjoy reading and gaining insight from the books, and teachers and therapists are eager to use them, citing them as powerful teaching tools and tools for change. Furthermore, with nonprofit early childhood initiative now using the books to further their worthy aim and foreign publishers now translating and publishing them abroad, we are gratified to extend our mission to bring these books to toddler and their adults everywhere.