Ten Tips for Parents and Teachers About Healing Stories That Help Kids Cope

Digging through the trash barrel, item by item by porch light, searching for the missing leg, I realized that a miserable, crying child can motivate a parent to do almost anything. A leg had had broken off my daughter Nora’s little figurine, a toy policeman carried from a foreign land by a big brother for the little sister who was now inconsolable because it had been dropped and broken and its leg could not be found. Anywhere.

Then, mid-trash barrel, a memory came to my mind. The now one-legged doll sparked a memory, an image of Joe, the husband of my childhood ballet teacher, with his crutches and his neatly rolled and pinned pants leg hanging loosely where his knee and lower leg had been before he had gone to war.

As a parent, my emotional first aid kit contained hugs, kisses, listening, distraction, walks in the woods and, evidently…