The Sky Is Not Falling! Let's laugh! Let's focus on the positive! Let's READ!

There are many real life scary things going on with the world right now. I have been reading a ton of articles about the ways kids are responding to the constant negative messages coming out of the television and time and time again the advice is to make them feel safe, cared about and confident that things can and will get better. To give them examples of wonderful things that are going on right now and are not reported on the evening news (An example, Cresthill Middle School in Highlands Ranch, CO just did a canned food drive to help the less fortunate. 35,000 cans were collected in ONE school!!! Did you hear that? 35,000 cans of food collected by seventh and eighth graders and of course the lovely teachers and staff!) The constant advice to parents is to give kids hope and to provide positive, happy things to focus on rather than all of the grown up problems.

When I was a boy I remember my Dad telling me the story about Chicken Little and assuring me that my world was in fact NOT crashing down. The sky would still be blue in the morning, soon enough the low, dark clouds that had momentarily taken over the sky would drift away and sure enough the storm that was troubling me passed.

As an adult I FRACTURED the old story about Chicken Little in my book The Sky Is Falling - Little Chicken Charlie and it has become the book kids tell me is my funniest yet... How many times have we heard the sage old saying: "Laughter is the best medicine!"?

So, if you need a good laugh, pull out a copy of The Sky Is Falling or The Diary of a Wimpy Kid or Arnie the Doughnut or The Stinky Cheese Man or a Roald Dahl book (any of them will do) or a Dr. Seuss book, my favorite being Yertle The Turtle. If you need some sage advice, take it from Jerry the Dog, my narrator in The Tails Tales of Mr. Murphy and you will find as you read that you are smiling, then chuckling, then laughing and all of a sudden those things that were weighing SO heavily will fade away... at least for the moment those low, dark clouds will drift away.