Colour Away Your Worries by Dr. Leslie Ironside (A Review)
About the Book
Colour Away Your Worries is a British coloring book (hence the spelling of colour) designed to help kids deal with the worries in their lives.
Who Is This Book For?
The book is meant for kids and teens who are struggling with anxiety, fear and worry. Though it is meant as a coloring book, even kids who don’t color can get something out of this book.
Our Synopsis of the Book
This book is meant to engage kids in the process of vocalizing and overcoming their worries. It follows a three step process:
- Get the child to articulate the fear or anxiety.
- Share the worry by either writing it down or drawing about it.
- Redirecting thoughts to help the child understand that they can deal with anxiety by thinking about other things.
This book is wonderfully illustrated and engaging. Unlike some workbooks that just encourage kids to make a list of color a picture, this workbooks engages kids at every step along the way.
The book starts by having the user record some introductory things about themselves. It moves from there to understanding that everyone has worries and fears. This is important for kids who so often wrestle with their emotions feeling like they are the only one experiencing it.
From there, the book explores some things that often scare specific people and what our face and body look like when we’re scared. The book differentiates between good/healthy worries and unhealthy worries. The book also offers a good list of coping skills kids can use to help deal with their worries like creating a worry box, letting your worries float away like a balloon, concentrating on something else and many others.
Amazon’s Synopsis
Here’s how Amazon describes the book:
Colour Away Your Worries allows children to de-stress and relax through coloring, doodling, and drawing. Boys and girls will benefit from the stress-relieving effects that increased focus and creativity can provide. There are no rules or complicated step-by-step instructions in these pages—children can simply scribble, scrawl, and shade to their hearts’ content.
What We Liked
The artwork in the book is phenomenal and is reason enough to buy the book. Add to that a very thorough and effective method for dealing with fears and worries and this become one of the best books we have seen for helping kids discover what they’re afraid of and develop coping skills for dealing with it.
What We Didn’t Like
Not much! The book does, I think quite intentionally, use snakes and monsters as part of the process of getting kids to talk about their fears. I suppose there is an outside chance that this could present a problem for kids who fear snakes or monsters already. That said, I highly doubt it as the artwork is fun not scary, and the whole purpose of the book is learning how to overcome your worries.
Recommendation
We recommend Colour Away Your Worries for any child or teen struggling with anxiety and worry. The book strikes a wonderful balance between being full of useful information and fun and engaging. The primary target for this book is likely older elementary aged kids, but we can certainly see older kids and teens enjoying and benefiting from it as well. Whether you are a Picasso in training or have the artistic ability of a two year-old, this book will be both fun and helpful.
For more awesome resources for learning about and dealing with emotions, please visit our Hope 4 Hurting Kids Emotions Help Center.
