Monmouth Co. Therapist, Mom Launches Children's Book About Grief

MANALAPAN, NJ — Robyn Spodek-Schindler, 40, a therapist from Manalapan, lost her dad about 10 years ago before he could meet or even know of her two sons.

Through her grief journey and as her kids started growing up, the Manalapan mom wrote and illustrated a children's book that deals with the tough topic of losing a loved one.

"Three Brave Stars" was published this week and tells the tale of a royal family in the enchanting kingdom of Bellagio as they learn that not all stories are about their happy endings.

"The entire book, in the end, was basically part of my grief journey," Spodek-Schindler told Patch.

At the same time, it was also a way for her to talk to her children about it and to offer a tool for other families to use. After the death of her dad, she started thinking about how she would talk to her future family about him.

"At the time I did not have any children and that began to be a very sore spot," Spodek-Schindler said. "I kept thinking 'well, how are they going to know anything about my dad? How am I gonna teach them?' So I started transforming my words into more of an acceptable children's story, to really try and teach my own future children what it means to not know someone or to lose someone maybe even that you never had or to miss someone that can't be with you."

As a therapist who works mostly with kids, teenagers and young adults, through art therapy, Spodek-Schindler said that when dealing with grief she would ofter reach for a handful of three or four books. However, she felt the subject wasn't dealt with head-on.

"None of those books really allow a character in that story to die. They kind of allude at the fact that there's a death," she said. " I often found that kids had a hard time grasping those stories. Whereas the adults that read the stories were like, 'oh I get it.' I understood because that's such a difficult topic. So I then said to myself 'I really want this book that I wrote, which I wrote for myself, to maybe help other families now.'"

Spodek-Schindler said she hopes the book will be sort of "the extra hand that your kids can hold when they learn about this very
difficult topic."

The therapist believes it's hard for many parents to talk to their kids about losing someone close because they fear that their kids will experience grief just like they do.

"You kind of want them to figure it out for themselves to have their own grief journey. So I think a lot of parents hesitate, especially in the office with me in session, they stop themselves when they start to feel like they're gonna cry and I always say 'why are you doing that,'" said Spodek-Schindler. "It's okay that you're crying. I think it's really good for your child to see that this is emotional and that it's bad and that you have these feelings. The more they see the more they understand. (...) We're so concerned about being the best parent or the best whatever we need to be but we're allowed to be emotional."

After losing her dad to brain cancer in 2012, Spodek-Schindler had trouble using painting and drawing as her creative outlet.

"For whatever reason, I just gravitated toward my laptop and I just started typing. I started typing thoughts and words and feelings and it all just started filling out all over the place," she said.

She became pregnant with her first child in late 2013.

"It was when I was pregnant with my son that I really started doing a lot more with the story. Once my son was born that's when I really got the idea of wanting to have this story be produced for him," she said.

In 2018 she had her second son and found a publisher interested in developing her book.

The story is especially targeted at kids between the ages of 6 and 12.

"Based on what other people have told me (it) is more of the difficult age to kind of talk about death and dying," she said.

However, she has also read it to her four-year-old son.

"If you are going through something like this, it's definitely worth giving it a try."

In the practice she founded in 2012, Spodek-Schindler helps kids through art therapy. It's called Paint the Stars Art Therapy.

"Kids don't really feel like they're being pressured to talk and instead they're creating but what happens is while they're creating a lot of things start to spill out of them. They kind of let their walls down and they feel a little bit more relaxed. They do start talking about those more difficult issues," Spodek-Schindler explained.

As she's opened to other families over the past few years about her grieving process, many have told her how hard it is to start a conversation about death and dying.

"As I started writing and kind of talking about it more, I had so many families reach out to me telling me 'oh my God, we need something like this. I don't know how to start this conversation,'" she said. "So that's kind of where I got to the point where I am now which is that I'm actually publishing the book and putting it out there for more than just my family, for all these other families who've experienced a lot, who need to have that conversation with their kids and they don't know how to do it."

"Three Brave Stars" is available online on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

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