The worn one with the missing eye. Not the new one, not the nicer one, the same one, every night, no substitutes. There's a real, well-established reason for this, and it's worth understanding rather than gently trying to phase it out. Paediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott named this in 1953: a "transitional object," his term for the first thing a child chooses for themselves that stands in for a parent's presence when the parent isn't there. It isn't a toy in the or

There's a well-established field of research called bibliotherapy: the use of stories to help someone process an emotional experience. Two studies, specifically about personalized children's books rather than reading in general, get precise about what that actually requires. Psychologist Natalia Kucirkova, in a 2016 paper in the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, found that when parents and children shared a personalized book together, both showed significantly more smiling