New book helps manage mental health
When Chicken Little is hit on the head by an acorn, she believes the sky is falling and tells all her barnyard friends. Believing disaster is imminent, the animals seek refuge in the fox’s lair, never to come out again.
Where the folk tale ends, Dr. Michele Winchester-Vega’s “sequel,” “Chicken Little, Come Out! The Sky is Not Falling!: Helping Children Express and Cope with Their Anxiety,” picks up with the scared animals hiding in the barn, declaring they will never venture out again, fearing the sky will fall on them.
Imagined before the COVID-19 pandemic and released last week, Winchester-Vega’s children’s book offers ways to manage and normalize children’s mental health and foster conversation and understanding. By reading the book, children will learn how to identify and normalize their worries, fears, and anxieties while increasing their mental health awareness and learning new strategies for improved coping.
The book offers warning signs a child might be suffering from anxiety. In the story, the animals experience shortness of breath, stomach pain and headaches, faster heartbeats, and hot flashes. It also contains strategies for caregivers and parents, as well as a list of resources for children and grownups.
Winchester-Vega, a psychiatric social worker for 36 years with a practice in New Windsor, said the story is dedicated and based on the teachings of her former mentor, Dr. Tom Kennedy, a child psychologist.
“He used to use the term, ‘Chicken Little, the sky is not falling,’ when talking about children who were anxious and really didn’t have that holding environment from which to operate,” said Winchester-Vega.
When Kennedy passed away, Winchester-Vega decided to use the phrase and re-write the story. She reached out to three colleagues, who had never published, to help collaborate on the project.
Over the course of a year, Winchester-Vega met with Sharen Casazza, Katie Helpley, and Corrine Varnavides at least once a month to strategize and write.
“It’s not real wordy, it’s more creative,” she said of the book. “I found it to be a really easy process to work with the others because I knew them and we were like-minded.
That isn’t to say we didn’t have differences in the way we saw things, but generally we all had the same vision — that it would be helpful to young children and to provide strategies for their caregivers and family members. I found it invigorating at times. It was really fun.”
The book is not Winchester-Vega’s first published work. As a professor for many years at Yeshiva University, she wrote and published many articles and anthologies. A number of years ago she self-published a book with her daughter titled “Are You My Sister?” It’s a book about girls working with each other instead of competing against each other.
Available on Amazon and out of Winchester-Vega’s office at 3250 U.S. Rt. 9W, New Windsor, all profits from the sale of “Chicken Little” are being donated to an organization called Kids for Causes which is managed out of the Community Foundation of Orange and Sullivan.
