About Our Books
Our Stories
Rocky Books feature stories that include relatable situations and characters to help contextualise a variety of difficult experiences that children may face including:
War and conflict
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Parental separation or divorce
Research suggests that when children read stories of families experiencing similar hardships to their own, it helps them feel less alone and validated.
Our books on trauma include narratives of families from diverse backgrounds experiencing a range of challenging scenarios. Feedback from our young readers has shown that this helps them feel acknowledged, particularly those from minority backgrounds who often feel overlooked in mainstream media.This then gives them the confidence to have conversations about their feelings and seek support from adults they feel safe with.
Rocky Books stories are written by our co-founder Nida Sheriff who specialises in Trauma Informed content writing. Trauma informed practice ensures our books are safe to read by everyone. You can learn more about our Trauma Informed Practice below.
Our Exercises
Each Rocky Book contains exercises that children can learn to use either on their own or with an accompanying adult. These exercises are prescribed by our co-founder and family therapist Sheena Vassiliades. They are appropriately tailored to address the needs of the child experiencing a specific adverse situation.
The exercises also link the children’s interests to the coping skill to reflect a culture of encouraging children to use play to ground themselves. For example, in the book “Ali Learns How To Feel Safe”, Ali, who loves to play football with his friends, learns to address his feelings of worry and sadness with a game of paper football.
Our exercises include:
Breathing exercises for children.
Grounding exercises for children using their environment.
Coping exercises for children using their hobbies, for example, drawing or football.
Exercises for children to recognise and map their emotions.
Interactive and creative exercises to do with a carer, sibling or friend.
One-on-one exercises to foster healthy communication with an adult.
Short and Long Term Guidance
Short term guidance may include:
Our catalogue of books offer tailored short and long term support skills to the reader in response to the scenarios illustrated in the particular story. We understand that some readers may want to learn how to cope with an immediate situation, while others may need long term guidance that can extend to:
Seeking external support for their problem
Leaving their current housing/environmental situation
Receiving legal or social support
Receiving long-term mental health support
Receiving healthcare
Long term guidance may include:
Grounding or coping exercises
Recommended activities for managing the situation in the short term
Immediate situational diffusion
A guide to asking for help from a trusted friend or family member.
Encouragement to seek support from a family therapist or counsellor.
Our Illustrations
Rocky Books are beautifully illustrated by experienced children’s book illustrators. Our illustrators are experts in character design, mise-en-scene and colouring. We work closely with our illustrators to create visually appealing, trauma-informed images that kids and parents love.
We upskill all our illustrators with our therapist-designed course for Trauma Informed Illustration, run by our co-founder and experienced family therapist Sheena Vassiliades.
Trauma Informed Practice
Rocky Books applies Trauma Informed Practice across all of our work, including our organisational operations.
What is Trauma?
Experiencing trauma means going through something very scary, sad, or hurtful that can make a person feel really upset or worried for a long time. It can be something that happens to them or something they see happen to someone else. This can affect the person physically and/or psychologically.
People can feel better over time with love and support from others. In most cases, seeking professional help alongside support from family and friends can be the best way to begin healing from a traumatic experience.
What is Trauma-Informed Practice?
Trauma-informed practice is an approach to creating resources that takes into account the fact that users may be affected by trauma experienced in the past, or are currently experiencing negative effects from trauma.
The Rocky Books Team is constantly working towards increasing our awareness of the effects trauma can have on children, negatively affecting their mental and physical well-being.
Trauma-informed practice - the knowledge of the impact of trauma - is at the centre of our work and informs each step of our book-making process. You will notice this in practice when you read our books as we take great care in ensuring our books are never retriggering or retraumatising to users.