In this book review, I share my thoughts on Tamara S. Graham’s children’s book ‘Sunshine and The Power of Words’. A book that is perfect for HSP children to learn how to deal with the effects of name calling and learn compassion.

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

I am so excited to be sharing this book review with you! This book was written for HSP children. However, I believe that every highly sensitive person who wants to heal their inner child should get this book.

When I first read the book, I cried. Or to be more specific, my inner child cried, because it finally felt heard. Therefore I knew how important it was to get the word about this beautiful piece of art and knowledge for HSP children out there.

This book (series) will revolutionize parenting of HSP children. In this book review you will discover why I think that.

What To Expect From The Sunshine Book Series For HSP Children

Tamara S. Graham is the brilliant author behind the ‘Sunshine’-series. With her book series, she is creating the stories many of us craved back when we were HSP children ourselves.

Sunshine, the main character, is a highly sensitive child. In the different books, Sunshine’s experience of being an HSP child is described and illustrated in a fun, playful and meaningful manner.

Consequently, these book series help highly sensitive children to understand important aspects such as how to deal with social anxiety, environmental awareness, dealing with separation anxiety, embracing their sensitivity and many more!

In her debut novel ‘Sunshine and The Power of Words’, Tamara S. Graham elegantly created a story about coping with the effects of name calling and learning compassion.

Below, I briefly summarized the plot. However, don’t let this stop you from purchasing the book, because this is just a brief description of what you can expect for your HSP children.

The Plot

Sunshine, the main character, had a bad day at school. Other kids were being mean to her and calling her cruel things. Things that were not true and hurtful. Therefore, Sunshine goes home to find comfort in the kind and loving words of her grandma and the support of her dear cat – her safe haven.

Throughout the story ‘Sunshine and The Power of Words’, Sunshine works through her emotions in a kind, loving and warm way together with her grandma. First, she explains how her day at school went and what experiences upset her.

Then her grandma lovingly listens to her experience, before starting to use specific techniques, metaphors and language to make her granddaughter feel better. Throughout the story, grandma shares her wise thoughts to help Sunshine feel better and cope with the power of words and hurtful experiences in life through a lens of compassion.

For instance, she talks about useful ways to tackle tough situations at school. The two have a deep, meaningful and touching conversation about how Sunshine can work through the experience. Also, she learns how to deal with these challenges in the future.

Ultimately, Sunshine feels better and decides to spread her love and newly gained knowledge with other HSP children – the readers of this book.

My Thoughts On ‘Sunshine and The Power of Words’

As I mentioned, this book truly touched me, because I still have some inner child healing to work on. This book contributed to making my inner child feel validated, loved and seen. Therefore, it was a beautiful experience to read this book, even as an adult.

Below, I am sharing some small fragments from the book, that particularly touched my soul.

“Grandma, sometimes I can feel what the other kids at school are feeling”. – Sunshine

“It might be easy to mix up which feelings are yours or the other person’s. We might feel like we are sad or angry when it isn’t even our own emotion. We could get confused about how we really feel.” – Grandma

This part of the book truly touched my heart and I could not stop bawling my eyes out, because my inner child felt so comforted. Tamara S. Graham beautifully incorporates the empathic characteristics of HSP children in this story.

With this story line, she validates the experiences many HSP children have regarding their empathy. Moreover, she uses unique metaphors to help the young readers understand the messages in a child-friendly, easy comprehendible way.

“Grandma touched the wind chime above the kitchen table. She knew it would help her granddaughter relax. Sunshine loved that twinkling sound which inspired her to take a calming, deep breath.”

What I really liked about this book, is that it is not only valuable for HSP children, but also their parents. It provides parents with examples on how to support their beautiful HSP children in a way that resonates with them.

Language & Illustration

Author Tamara S. Graham uses soft, loving language to get across her message.

For instance, she works with many inspiring and comprehendible metaphors to get across the wisdom of the story. Moreover, the metaphors of this book are easily applicable in daily life for HSP children.

The author managed to translate adult wisdom into child-friendly, fun and interesting language. As a result, I am sure that these wisdoms will help many HSP children to thrive in life.

Also, the illustrations that go along with the story are spot on! The Sunshine series are illustrated by Gaspar D. Sabater. He managed to support the powerful messages of this book with his accurate, playful and beautiful artwork.

To summarize, the story combined with the colorful art create a beautiful book for HSP children.

Some Final Thoughts On This Book For HSP Children

After reading this book, I can highly recommend it to others looking for a good HSP children’s book! Even if you don’t have children, but have some inner child healing to do, this is a powerful tool to validate your inner child.

If your child is struggling with dealing with hurtful words, this book will help your child understand these situations. Moreover, this book also offers valuable tools to you as a parent or grandparent to help your highly sensitive child when it is struggling with hurtful words.

I believe that one of the main struggles for parents who are not highly sensitive is to understand what their highly sensitive child needs. Therefore, this book is a true lifesaver! It helps parents and other caretakers of HSP children to grasp the concepts of high sensitivity in a simple way.

To summarize, I believe that this book series will create a better future for highly sensitive people, providing HSP children and their parents with the right methods to thrive in life. It will soon be available in Spanish as well and I cannot wait for it to be translated for the Dutch market, so I can purchase it for my nephew and niece!

Would you like to purchase the book? You won’t regret it. You can order it straight from Amazon via this link!

You May Also Enjoy Reading These Articles

• Is My Extroverted Kid A Highly Sensitive Child
• Do You Know Your Self Care Love Language?

The post ‘Sunshine And The Power Of Words’: A Powerful Book For HSP Children appeared first on HiSensitives.

I reviewed the book “The Highly Sensitive Parent: Be Brilliant in Your Role, Even When the World Overwhelms You”, even though I am not a parent.

(Disclosure: This is a professional book review and HiSensitives gets compensated for it by the publisher of the book. We only share links to products that we stand for and share our honest opinion on products with our followers.)

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

As a woman approaching my thirties, I am frequently getting asked when my fiancé and I will have children. They are asking the wrong question. The right question is ‘if’ we will have children.

Both my fiancé and I are HSP’s and to be honest, the thought of becoming parents amazes and terrifies us at the same time. Sure, there are tons of wonderful moments to cherish. It would be amazing to see this little mini version of the two of us running around.

However, we are well aware of the impact the decision to have children will have on our lives. We know that once you become a parent, everything will change. The days where you were able to sleep through the whole night will be long gone.

Becoming A Parent Is A Major Decision

Once you choose to become a parent, you become a parent for life. It is a huge choice. The biggest choice you will ever make in your life. And this choice does not only have an impact on you, but also on this new little person you put into this world. After all you want to be a good parent and raise a decent human being. 

Therefore, I was thrilled, when I saw that Elaine N. Aron had brought out a new book. This time specifically for highly sensitive parents: “The Highly Sensitive Parent: Be Brilliant in Your Role, Even When the World Overwhelms You.” 

Perhaps this book could help us in this major decision. In this blog I am sharing my thoughts on this book with you.

(Ps. In the picture above you see me holding the Dutch version of the book. In the image below you can see the book cover of the English version.)

About “The Highly Sensitive Parent: Be Brilliant In Your Role, Even When The World Overwhelms You”

Author Elaine N. Aron wrote this book for the highly sensitive parent. It is not a book about how to parent your child, but a book that helps you to discover how you as a highly sensitive person can fulfill your role as a parent optimally. 

While highly sensitive people are exceptionally attuned to their children’s needs, they also experience a different kind of stress compared to non-HSP parents. Worrying deeply about their child’s well-being, strong emotions and overwhelm are some of the common challenges highly sensitive parents experience. 

In this book, the author explains these different challenges a highly sensitive parent may encounter during parenthood and how to tackle them.

The Structure Of The Book: A Short Overview

In her book, Elaine N. Aron first offers a self-examination to identify the level of sensitivity. This is very useful if you haven’t taken the self test earlier and want to determine how sensitive you actually are. 

Also, she explains how highly sensitive parents differ from non-HSP parents. This explanation is backed up with interesting findings from scientific studies. I had to share a fact or two from this chapter with my friends and family. The insights were so surprising to me!

In the second chapter, the author brilliantly catches your attention by starting with the perhaps biggest challenge for highly sensitive parents: overstimulation. Here, she explains the common sources of overstimulation for a highly sensitive parent. Also, she offers practical tips on how to deal with this. One of the main solutions for this issue, ‘asking for help’, is discussed thoroughly in chapter 3.

Chapter 4 dives into the highly sensitive parents’ depth of processing and decision making processes. It provides the reader with concrete tips on how to make decision-making as a highly sensitive parent easier.

In the following chapter the author discusses how highly sensitive parents can enjoy and regulate their greater emotional responsiveness through the different phases of their child’s life. Also here, practical tips are provided.

Chapter 6 discusses the intensification of social contacts once you become a parent. It elaborates on the different social contacts you create once you have children. Also, it dives into how to interact with all of these types of connections when you are highly sensitive.

The last two chapters of the book touch upon highly sensitive parents and their partners. Here, common issues that may arise during parenthood are discussed as well as tools on how to fix them.

My opinion on ‘“The Highly Sensitive Parent: Be Brilliant in Your Role, Even When the World Overwhelms You”

There was not one thing I did not love about this book. Throughout the whole book, Elaine N. Aron shows that she is a typical HSP with an eye for detail: everything has been thought of!

It is comforting for me to read that our worries about parenthood and its challenges do not come out of the blue. They are valid concerns. However, this book gave me hope that we can be brilliant parents with the right tools in our tool kit and enough help from our surroundings.

What I especially enjoyed with regards to this book is that it considers parenthood through all the different phases of a child’s life. Every parent can read this book and receive useful advice from it.

Another aspect that I found useful while reading Elain N. Arons’ book from my perspective of a highly sensitive non-parent, is that it also offers relationship advice – for both couples and those who are divorced. One of our biggest concerns with regards to having children is that our relationship will be put to the test. These last chapters provided us with insights on how to take care of each other once you become parents.

Also the chapter on social connections when you have children and how to deal with them is a very interesting chapter to read. I am currently planning a wedding. Boy, you can’t imagine how many times others have told me what our wedding day should look like.

Reading this chapter made me realize that once you have children, people will continuously express their opinion about how you should raise your child to you, even if you did not ask for it. However, the author provided excellent tips on how to cope with these types of situations.

Would I Recommend Reading The Book?

Overall, I would definitely recommend this book to both highly sensitive parents and those highly sensitive people still doubting whether they can handle parenthood. 

For us, it offered the comfort we needed to make our decision. I know that I now have a little pocket guide on my bookshelf which I can reach for in the future when I become a mom. 

If you’d like to read the book yourself, you can purchase it here.

You May Also Enjoy Reading These Articles

• Is My Extroverted Kid A Highly Sensitive Child
• Highly Sensitive People Share Their Opinion About Raising Children

The post Book Review: The Highly Sensitive Parent: Be Brilliant In Your Role, Even When The World Overwhelms You appeared first on HiSensitives.