Does it ever feel like there’s a constant pressure on to be happy and to only ever experience positive emotions? (Nevermind the fact that we divide up the emotions between positive & negative, thereby already biasing them to be thought of as either good or bad for you.)

Well here are some picture books that talk about (negative) emotions and acknowledge them as being part and parcel of being human (… strictly speaking, animal, since when they feature, the humans involved are not the ones experiencing the negative emotions). Some of them discuss how it’s perfectly OK to be experiencing these ups and downs, whereas others highlight what emotions such as fear and jealousy (or in this particular case, the selfish personality of the giraffe) hold you back from the possibility of experiencing things you could never have previously imagined.

Grumpy Monkey by Suzanne Lang, illustrated by Max Lang, is great at portraying how sometimes our grumpiness can seem completely illogical: there’s nothing to be grumpy about, but you know what? We all wake up on the wrong side of the bed some days, and that’s alright! Having your friends there to be there for you, even if what they’re doing isn’t cheering you up per se, can be a boon to your emotional state. Grumpy Monkey yells at his friends, denying his grumpiness, but it’s when he actually accepts that yes, he just might be grumpy, and yes, his friends do still love & care for him, that he starts to feel a bit better.

Michael Ian Black, the author of a number of other picture books such as I’m Bored, Naked!, The Purple Kangaroo, among others, has come out with another installment of I’m Bored: I’m Sad.

A sad flamingo tells his friends that he’s feeling down, and the little girl and a potato try out a few of the ways they try to cheer themselves up whenever they’re feeling sad. It would be great during a storytime to ask what makes the children feel better when they’re sad so they can share their experiences! Who else dunks themselves in dirt to feel better when they’re down, like Potato does? Or eats ice cream like the little girl? The flamingo also asks something probably all of us have feared when feeling sad for anything longer than 3 seconds: “Will I always feel like this?”, expressing plainly one of our fears when we become sad for a length of time. Black plainly addresses some of the thoughts we have when we’re feeling sad – because everyone feels sad at least sometimes – including the anxiety we feel about being sad: “Will you still like me if I’m sad again tomorrow?” Flamingo asks. The wry humour at the end does a great job at turning around the soft and gentle tone throughout the book and ending on a high note.

And then there’s this gem where our protagonist, Jo, gets to overcome her fear of monsters lurking under the waters only because her father becomes sick with a bad case of the sea cold: Off & Away by Cale Atkinson. Jo loves her father, who delivers the messages and gifts in bottles that get thrown into the water to their recipients and brings home delightful tales that make Jo want to be the one to deliver everyone’s mail when she grows up. The illustrations are gorgeous, and you really feel for Jo as she decides to face her fears till the end, making new friends along the way and discovering that the “monsters” that live in the depths of the sea are really just friendly beasts that have been misunderstood by Jo (and in the case of the last one, many others) all along. Returning to her father’s side after delivering the pile-up of bottled messages and gifts, Jo has a great story of her own to tell her father.