Tinley Park Author Uses Mystery To Spark Kids' Interactive Skills

TINLEY PARK, IL — Joy Gallivan always knew she had a children's book inside of her, but the timing of when to actually sit down and write one never seemed to come into focus.

So, when the Tinley Park mother of two and long-time school social worker’s daughter asked Gallivan what she was waiting for to finally develop the book she had always envisioned writing, she didn’t have a great answer.

That led Gallivan to self-publish “Mystery Feelings: A Guide To Feelings Identification”, a book that tackles what Gallivan is the number one issue facing preschool-aged children today. Gallivan has worked as social worker for the previous seven years at the Dr. Julian Rogus School in Frankfort but has worked for the past 22 years in the same capacity.

In that time, she has interacted with young students who often arrive at their first formal education setting knowing colors, numbers, letters, and other basics. But she says that many preschool students — including those who spend hours each day on tablets and glued to screens — arrive at school unaware of how to physically interact with other children and forge meaningful friendships and relationships.

Especially coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic when social interaction and in-person activities were heavily restricted by health and government regulations, Gallivan decided that she couldn’t wait any longer to begin sharing valuable lessons with young students and their parents. The premise for the book is based on teachable moments that Gallivan says she has been stressing for years, but that many parents have ignored for too long.

“If (kids) don’t even know how to interact with basic social interaction skills, when something big does happen like anger or frustration or sadness, they’re really struggling with those big emotions,” Gallivan told Patch on Friday.

The book uses colorful illustrations that include children of a variety of nationalities, ability levels, religions, and physical abilities as a way of making the book as inclusive as possible. Through a series of lessons, the book teaches young readers to identify facial expressions and other identifiers that provide children with insight into how other kids they come into contact with are feeling.

Gallivan uses a mystery-story genre to engage children to make them want to look for clues like facial expressions, body language, and one's surroundings to solve the mystery of better understanding how to deal better with other kids.

The book also has a section in the back for parents, which Gallivan hopes will prompt parents to work more with their kids on these vital skills. The parental section instructs adults on how to take the lessons for kids a step further as a way of creating emotional muscle memory that teaches kids to better engage with others starting at a very young age.

While older children understand how to read social cues, instilling these lessons at a much younger age isn’t something that is on the radar of many parents, Gallivan said. Gallivan says that COVID set the ability to get preschool-aged kids in front of other kids their age back drastically just because more traditional activities like library programs, dance classes, or play groups were all canceled or forced to go virtual.

That made the lessons found in Gallivan’s book even more important, she said.

“These are the kids that didn’t have (in-person programs) and so I don’t know if the parents realize how simple it is (to say), ‘Stop — look at that person’s face — how do you think (something) made them feel?’” Gallivan said.

She added: “When you’re 10 (years old) or 12 and you haven’t learned to interact with or acknowledge feelings or how to interact with other humans, that’s something that should have been worked on earlier.”

Gallivan says that schools are very focused on teaching basic subjects like reading, math, and writing. But Gallivan says that in the same way that young students shouldn’t be expected to walk into school knowing how to construct a proper sentence, they shouldn’t be expected to walk in and immediately know how to interact with others.

She said like anything else, that is something that needs to be learned and developed at a young age.

That led Gallivan to write her book. After years of creating her own teaching tools, because she didn’t like many existing educational materials, Gallivan finally decided to put her ideas and methods into book form. She went the self-published route just to get the concept of teaching kids to read other children into the public eye. Gallivan hopes that over time, a publisher will pick up the concept and publish even more books.

But for now, she hopes that her first book can make a big difference in addressing the need to begin teaching these lessons and skills to kids at a very young age. Gallivan hopes that early childhood teachers and educators — as well as community groups that work with young children – can use the books to begin to foster these habits in young kids.

By picking up on simple facial expressions and other cues, children can know how to react and respond to others at very young ages, Gallivan said. In doing so, they establish important skills that will provide them with lessons on how to build better relationships at an age when doing so is critically important.

“People try to address this, and they talk about happy and they talk about sad, but nobody talks about the physical (identifiers),” Gallivan said.

She added: “But it’s like any other (school) subject — it’s about practice, practice, practice. …The more they practice, it becomes like a knee-jerk reaction …and hopefully, that carries over to their interactions with the rest of their class and to other people.”