Interview With Jane Annunziata About Shy Spaghetti and Excited Eggs

Interviewer [female voice]: Why did you write Shy Spaghetti and Excited Eggs, and how is it helpful to kids?

Jane Annunziata: Oh, well, that's our newest book and our current favorite book. We wrote it because we felt that there was a great need to teach children from a very young age about feelings. You know — what feelings are, how they're best managed. And what we found was that in looking at other books about feelings for kids, they were much more kind of encyclopedic. You know — "happy is, sad is." I'm sure they're very good. I'm sure they're very helpful. But we wanted to take a different approach because we thought it would be much more helpful to kids to have a book that was very engaging and fun for them to read, and not only explained what the different emotions are but explained how to handle the different emotions.

And what we talk about in the book is even some emotions that kids and adults may think about as positive emotions — like the emotion "happy" — that when taken to too big of a place, as we say, can result in a child being over-excited and somewhat silly and off-putting to others. So even some emotions that seem very basic, we look at in a kind of comprehensive way and we really teach people about the emotion and about how to handle the emotion.

Interviewer: What are some of the ways that you've heard of therapists using this book?

Jane Annunziata: I can tell you how I use it and also how other therapists use it. Sometimes we bring it into a session with a child and we work on a particular feeling. Like, you felt particularly sad today; let's look at the book and let's talk about sad feelings.

I have recommended that parents take the book away with them. If a certain feeling comes up, for example, on a trip. Like, if we work with children who feel maybe very sad when they have to leave a vacation. I have one child that I work on with that all the time. I suggest that they pack the book and read the book when the child starts to have a sad feeling.

The same at home. If you have a child that is struggling with anger, that when you look at ways to help your child cope with feelings of anger — and there are several — one of the ways would be to say, "Well, let's go read the book and see what they talk about in terms of managing angry feelings."

Interviewer: Why is it important or useful for kids to learn about emotions?

Jane Annunziata: This, I think, is the most critical point. When you look at the problems people have in life, children and adults, you can boil it down many times to problems with feelings. Even when you look at relationship problems, marital problems, a lot of times it's how people communicate about their feelings, how people manage their feelings. When you look at children and problems they have, whether it's at home, in school, behavior problems, they're often related to poor handling of feelings.

So we thought it was critical to start to teach about feelings at a very young age and teach constructive ways to manage feelings, because we felt it really would put a foundation in place for success in life, success in relationships, success at work. And we think it's just the core piece when we talk about healthy emotional functioning, would be to first understand feelings, label feelings, know what they are, know why you feel them, and know how to handle them.