Sick Seven is a picture book about a number who gets sick on the inside. Not a cold, not a bug, just the particular sickness that comes from carrying too much worry and too much pressure to be good enough. I am Dr. Sean Tobin, a clinical psychologist, and I wrote it for the four to eight year olds who already know that feeling and don't have a word for it yet. Paperback and Kindle.

Seven doesn't get fixed by advice. Everybody on the street has a suggestion and keeps walking, which is roughly how it goes for a kid in distress. Then a quiet character shaped like a plus sign stops, sees him, and stays, and that turns out to be the whole medicine. Seven's color comes back. The last thing he does in the book is stop for somebody else.

Two things I've never admitted inside the book itself. The first is that it is the Good Samaritan. Everyone passes the one in the ditch until somebody stops, sees, stays, and then pays for what comes next, and that is the shape of the story, with a plus sign that happens to look like a cross doing the stopping. The second is that the title is a dad joke. My kids, like every kid in North America at the moment, cannot stop saying six seven at the dinner table, and I decided the correct response was to write an entire children's book about a sick seven and publish it. Writing a book is a long way to go for a joke, and I regret nothing.

Underneath the joke it is doing real clinical work. Kids learn that distress is not a defect to be fixed, that presence is what actually helps, and that they can be the one who stops. It reads aloud in about the length of a bedtime that's already running late.