What are the conversations we want to have with our kids about their emotional lives? How do we make sure we are equipping them with the skills they need not just to feel better in the moment, but to feel learn from their experiences and feel confident that they can navigate wherever they land?
These are the guiding questions of my new book, Emotional Navigation for Kids and Teens: Parent Pivots for Everyday Moments and a Lifetime of Growth, coming out December 8, 2026. I’ve been imaging this book in my head for a long time, sitting with families who want to help their kids in difficult emotional moments, but struggle with how. The urgency and push to write the book came from early in the pandemic when we were all feeling lost emotionally, and really in every way. I wanted to create maps for parents that would be simple and clear enough to remember when you need it and yet complex enough to capture the landscape of our children’s varying experiences. Today is the official book announcement, and I’m just so thrilled to share it with you now. Or, as we say in my house: the book is leaving my dining room table and on its way to you! (cue the cheers from my family…).
Kids are feeling so much today, and they often don’t know what to do with what they are feeling. Emotional overload can feel like the baseline. Overtaken by difficult thoughts and feelings, they may, by no fault of their own, find themselves parked in an emotion, and don’t know where to go from there. The emotion becomes the destination, and kids are really suffering. We know this when this happens in our own homes, and the youth mental health crisis lets us know—this is not just us. Kids need our help and we have the best ideas we’ve ever had to help.
For decades I’ve been immersed in the world of anxiety, OCD, and negative thinking, helping families decode confusing thoughts and feelings, and find the path forward. With Emotional Navigation for Kids and Teens, I’ve expanded the map to include the broader array of emotional experiences that are challenging for kids (or any of us) including: sadness, loneliness, jealousy, anger, frustration, grief, loss, and trauma. With scripts and strategies for preschoolers through highschoolers (and 20+ new illustrations thanks to my talented and generous husband, Phillip Stern), the book translates advances in emotional science into concrete, easily accessible ideas.
Why pivots? We want our kids to think more flexibly and accurately, but we can’t just do a hairpin turn to bring them to where we are, we have to take the scenic route through where they are. That’s how they are going to feel understood and importantly with our good guidance—how they’ll understand themselves and parse out the situations they’re in and the thinking they have about them.
Parents will get the lay of the land: learn the language of empathy and the essential language of those pivots to help kids feel supported, so they can then process, sort, evaluate, and interpret what they’re feeling in real time to decide what to do next. Helping kids know what their feelings are really telling them, they can right-size their interpretations, consider other perspectives, and take from them only what is useful and true, leaving behind painful or limiting interpretations or distortions about themselves or the world. This is where emotional intelligence and growth meet in the middle. This is the heart of the book and was my guiding vision through the process.
Because the goal isn’t simply for children to feel better in the moment. We want kids to become capable navigators of their own lives.
Emotional Navigation for Kids and Teens grew out of years of working with families where parents faced with their child struggling in a hard moment of anxiety, sadness, frustration, felt like they had an either/or choice: support and relieve suffering or try to “fix it” by offering a solution or a different interpretation. We all know—our well-intentioned “fix-it” instincts—well, they do not go over well. Kids would get upset, parents would get upset and everyone would try to move on—but not necessarily forward. That is the clincher.
The best way to the other side of an emotion is not “around,” but “through.” We know this, and honestly these are exactly the conversations I think we’d all like to have— but it’s hard! How do we get to that place of processing and workshopping the meaning of a moment with your child when they are upset and our reflexes are feeling it too? We often do abrupt pivots which leave kids not feeling understood—or understanding more about what’s going on for them— but there are subtler ones that can make all the difference.
The orienting model in the book and one of my favorite new framings to share is the idea that each emotion has two parts: the feeling part (what we need to honor in our experience) and the fixing part (what the emotion is telling us about how we need to change). Or put another way, the part we need to sit with, and the part we need to solve for. When we can overlay that two-sided map on the moments of emotion with our kids—share this map, not only can we meet our kids where they are, but they can learn to do the empowering toggle between feeling and fixing and not feel stuck or parked where they first land in their feelings. That is how growthful movement happens.
I have so much more I want to share, and uncharacteristically for me I am going to resist the urge to rewrite the entire book in this blogpost (I did this in previous drafts…). I really hope you’ll check out the book! But most of all, please stay tuned because I will be previewing some of my favorite new ideas, metaphors, and inspirations from the book in the coming months. You can subscribe to my newsletter and Instagram for more ideas and information along the way. Pre-orders help signal interest to the publisher, and give a new book a strong start, so if you think you’ll want to add Emotional Navigation for Kids and Teens to your family’s library, thank you for reserving your copy today.
I can’t wait to share these maps with you on December 8th! Here’s to less worry all around, and to a world where all kids know how to navigate their inner world as they make their way through an increasingly complex outer world, and flourish. Let’s build that world together for our children, one meaningful conversation at a time.
The beautiful video introducing the book is from Mer Stern (mersternmedia)
©2026 Tamar E. Chansky, Ph.D.
