Many parents of young children are quite familiar with sleepless nights.
Riverwoods mother Arielle Turover Cohen still remembers consoling her daughter when she routinely experienced night terrors. "She would wake up screaming," recalled Cohen, who worked for many years in Jewish education.
While her son didn't experience the nightmares, he would often crawl into his parents' bed on a nightly basis. "It was a battle of one child screaming in the middle of the night and another coming into bed with us," Cohen said.
One night, the sleep-deprived mother drew upon her own childhood experience and told her daughter that she could control the thoughts she had in her dreams. Then, she shared the same advice with her son, telling the story about a boy who has a nightmare, but builds his confidence by using the power of thought to become brave and unafraid.
"That night, I told the same story three times," she said. "When I picked him up at preschool the next day, he asked me twice to share the story and again when he went to bed."
With both of her children fast asleep, Cohen decided to write her children's book,
I Am Brave and Unafraid
. "I would read the story to my kids every night and within a few months their nightmares ended," she reflected. "Now, the book has morphed into something that has been helping children gain courage to overcome their own fears."
Last year, Cohen visited children at Kibbutz Nahal Oz-a community in southern Israel attacked on October 7-and shared a Hebrew translation of the book. She aspires to print 1,000 books in Hebrew to donate to Israeli children. Cohen spoke with Jewish Chicago about her book, her visit to Israel, and her evolving career as an author.
Q. How does I Am Brave and Unafraid empower children to confront their fears?
A. The book encourages your child to use their mind to overcome fear and negative thoughts by turning them into feelings of bravery and self-confidence.
How did the children in Israel react to your book readings?
I was a little nervous at first because I ask, 'What's a fear that you have and how did you get over your fear?' But these children have fears like everybody else. They are scared of things like the dark and dogs. They didn't talk about being scared of terrorists even though there were kids in the group who lost their parents.
It showed that despite [having just gone] through crazy trauma, children can be more resilient than adults. It's the adults who are still shaking and easily startled.
How did I Am Brave and Unafraid inspire your other work as an author?
A couple of years after I published,
I Am Brave and Unafraid
, I saw Shawn Achor, the author of
The Happiness Advantage
, speak at a real estate conference. I was inspired by the idea of creating happiness. I let the idea rest until COVID hit, [at which point] I realized that you can't really call yourself an author with just one published book under your belt, so I set a goal of publishing another.
My daughter was in fifth grade at the time and was going back to school after a year and a half of homeschool due to the pandemic. The year back was awful at schools everywhere; there was the worst bullying, fighting, and even ickiness between parents. She got to a point where she didn't want to go to school. So, one day I told her to put a big smile on her face before she got out of the car. It turned into a really good year. So, another real parenting experience inspired
Put On a Big Smile
.
What advice do you have for aspiring writers?
Everyone is a writer. For me, the ideas for my books have come from a problem that I need to overcome or solve. Be inspired by something that has happened for you. Persist until you succeed.
Learn more about how to donate a book to an Israeli child at tinyurl.com/IAmBraveandUnafraid.
