Bilingual Books About Feelings

Somewhere in your house there is a language your child understands but does not always use. Maybe it is the language you argue in, the one your mother prays in, the one that shows up at the dinner table when the good stories get told.

These books live in that space. Three picture books about feelings, printed in English alongside Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Cantonese, or Korean, so the person reading can use whichever language the moment needs. Written by Dr. Anna Huang, a clinical psychologist who works with young kids, and a mom who has carried a screaming child out of a grocery store more than once.

None of these books will make your child bilingual, and we want to be plain about that. Research on dual-language development suggests kids growing up hearing two languages build vocabulary in both, and that naming feelings out loud (affect labeling, in the literature) seems to help children settle. What the books actually do: give you a story to sit inside together, in your languages, about wanting a popsicle and not getting one, about a slide that looks too big, about a mom going out for the evening. Bilingualism is the setting. The feelings are the story.

We love you no matter how you feel. It is on the back of every book, because it kept being the truest thing we had to say after hard afternoons, in every language we print it in.

Each language has its own page with its own FAQ and its own notes for that community. Pick your pairing:

• Spanish-English bilingual children's books — for familias where bedtime happens in both.
• Simplified Chinese-English — Mandarin at home, English everywhere else.
• Traditional Chinese-English — Traditional characters for Taiwan and Hong Kong readers.
• Cantonese-English — for families who speak it at the dinner table.
• Korean-English — 한국어 and English, side by side on every spread.