Why Children Need Books About Grief, and Who Should Be Writing Them

Here is a gap on the bookshelf nobody likes to talk about: children grieve, and almost nothing on the shelf grieves with them.

We hand kids books about sharing, about potty training, about the first day of school. But when a child loses a parent? The shelf goes quiet. And for Black boys specifically, a book that shows their grief, their face, their healing? You could search a long time and come up empty.

That is exactly the gap Monica Boddie decided to close.

The therapist who put her expertise between two covers

Monica Boddie, LCSW-C, is a licensed mental health therapist and the owner of a behavioral health agency in Maryland. Grief, trauma, and healing are not abstract topics to her. They are her Tuesday. She has sat with the children the rest of us do not know how to talk to.

So she wrote Zayaquann's Story: From Trauma to Triumph, a picture book about a Black boy grieving the loss of his father, and walking, slowly and honestly, toward hope. We published it, and the illustrations do something most children's books never attempt: they let the sad pages actually be sad. A boy at a rainy window. A dinner table with an empty chair. And then, page by page, the light comes back.

A book like this does not talk a child out of their grief. It sits down next to it.

Do not take my word for it

The reviews say it plainly. Readers call it a magnificent, kindhearted tale of coping with grief and loss, and a great tool for teaching children how to work through despair and find their way back to hopefulness and gratitude. It has even been recommended on resource lists for families facing cancer, curated by people whose entire job is knowing which books actually help grieving families. That is not marketing. That is a book doing its work in the world.

You can see it for yourself, it is live on Amazon right here.

Now, the part that applies to you

Notice what Monica did, because it is a blueprint hiding in plain sight.

She did not write a book to become an author. She took the exact thing she does professionally, helping children process trauma, and delivered it in the format the people who need it can actually hold. A therapist wrote a therapy-informed children's book. Of course she did. Who better?

Whatever you do for a living, somebody needs it delivered as a book.

A nurse can write the health journal her patients keep failing to keep. A financial advisor can write the money book for kids, right? A pastor, a teacher, an HR director, a doula. Every profession is sitting on a book, because every profession exists to deliver a transformation, and a book is simply that transformation, printed and bound and able to reach people you will never meet.

Monica saw the empty spot on the shelf that her training qualified her, almost uniquely, to fill. There is an empty spot shaped like your expertise too.

What are you waiting for?