What?

A Dutch children’s book.

Flynn has stomach and headaches, but he doesn’t know why. He’d been to the hospital. Unfortunately, the doctor couldn’t find ‘anything’. Maybe he is stressed, the doctor had said. But what is stress? And why does that give him a stomach ache, and a headache? Flynn continues to play with his friends and has his grandparents over for a visit. Though, he does find himself running into some restless feelings.

Why?

I want to tell the story about Flynn. Flynn has psychosomatic distress, he is stressed, and he wonders what that means.

I hope that children will be able to recognize themselves in Flynn in their own way so that they can either feel for him or find solace in what they themselves might be experiencing too. For both children and parents/caregivers this book can offer understanding as well as acknowledgement towards ‘stress’, which can lead to earlier acknowledgement of the problems.

Through sharing five friendly but also informative stories within this book, I’d like to show the reader at a young age that one can also be sick there where it’s not directly physically visible. This so that they learn to recognize the feelings of stress they experience on time, and so that they can take this knowledge with them for the rest of their lives knowing it’s normal to feel stressed from time to time. With that being said, I want to share the message that we can do something to reduce the feeling of tension that stress is before it piles up and we get physically ill.

This supports TATUM New Perspective’s goal as it challenges the norm, the one related to our mental health and the importance of already communicating this topic at a young age.