🌟 A 19-Year Journey of Values - Sunny's Values Scouts 🌟
🎉 After 19 years, I’m thrilled to announce the completion of Sunny’s Values Scouts—a 20-book series dedicated to nurturing resilience and wellbeing in children! 🧡 This isn’t just a collection of stories—it’s a proactive roadmap for helping young minds build the emotional strength to navigate life’s challenges. 🌈 Follow #SunnyValuesScouts
From Belonging to Significance, each book brings to life 100 essential values, weaving them into adventures that inspire courage, kindness, and hope. 🐾🦅 Whether it’s Kody the Koala teaching acceptance or Penny the Penguin guiding children toward belonging, these stories empower kids to grow into compassionate, resilient adults.
Why does this matter? 💡 Because fostering values early in life builds the foundation for a robust society—one where challenges are met with strength and suicidal distress is prevented before it emerges. Together, let’s continue creating a world where every child feels valued and capable of overcoming life’s storms. 🌊
Let’s make resilience and wellbeing a part of every child’s journey. 🌟
Building Resilient Children: Why I Created Sunny’s Values Scouts
Why? The Urgent Need for a New Approach to Suicide Prevention
As a suicide prevention expert, I have observed a troubling and deeply concerning trend: children—some as young as nine or ten—threatening to jump from the balconies of their high-rise homes. These threats are often reactions to being disciplined by parents, disappointing test results, or even not getting what they want. This is not about children wanting to die; rather, they are struggling to cope with distress and resorting to extreme statements and actions because they lack the tools to process their emotions in a healthier way.
Today’s children face pressures that were almost nonexistent 15 or 20 years ago. The world they are growing up in is fast-paced and digitally connected, where instant gratification is the norm. Social media plays a major role in shaping their self-worth, and with that comes an increase in cyberbullying, comparison, and unrealistic expectations. Research indicates that adolescents who experience cyberbullying are more than four times as likely to report suicidal thoughts and attempts compared to those who haven’t faced online harassment (NIH, 2023).
The result? Growing distress, an inability to cope with setbacks, and an alarming rise in suicidal behaviors among children and teenagers worldwide. Suicide rates among young people are increasing in countries such as the UK, US, Australia, Canada, China, Japan, and India, where suicide is now one of the leading causes of death in teenagers. These statistics cannot be ignored.
For years, we have tried to address this crisis with the same traditional methods of suicide prevention, yet the problem persists. If we want to create real change, we must rethink our approach. I believe the answer lies in resilience-building, and resilience can only be cultivated through values—the guiding principles that shape how we respond to life’s challenges.
What? The Power of Values in Shaping Resilience
Values are the qualities we bring to our actions—they define who we are and how we navigate the world. Yet, as a society, we do not do enough to help children reflect on what kind of person they want to be.
Sunny’s Values Scouts was created to fill this gap. Instead of giving children lectures on life skills, the series invites them to explore core values through engaging, magical adventures. It encourages them to think about fundamental questions:
- What kind of person do I want to be?
- What kind of friend, sibling, or student do I want to be?
- What values will help me become that person?
When children start to internalize values, they develop emotional strength and coping mechanisms. Instead of reacting impulsively to distress, they learn to process disappointment, frustration, and setbacks in a healthy and constructive way.
How? The Sunny’s Values Scouts Approach to Resilience-Building
Sunny’s Values Scouts follows a golden retriever puppy named Sunny, who enters Terra Vale, a magical world where he teams up with animal characters to embark on adventures that embody core values. Each book focuses on 5 different values—such as belonging, courage, kindness, responsibility, or perseverance—woven seamlessly into an exciting story.
Through these adventures, children not only learn about different cultures and landscapes but also see values in action. Instead of being told what to do, they experience values through storytelling and discussion.
To support meaningful conversations, each story is followed by 10 structured discussion prompts for parents, educators, and counselors. These prompts help guide children in talking about choices, behavior, and emotional responses in a natural and engaging way.
This experiential approach gives children the language to express their emotions before they escalate into suicidality or self-harm. It allows them to articulate distress, disappointment, and frustration, rather than jumping straight to extreme reactions.
The Urgency: Why We Must Act Now
Values are the qualities we bring to our actions—they define who we are and how we navigate the world. Yet, as a society, we do not do enough to help children reflect on what kind of person they want to be.
Sunny’s Values Scouts was created to fill this gap. Instead of giving children lectures on life skills, the series invites them to explore core values through engaging, magical adventures. It encourages them to think about fundamental questions:
- What kind of person do I want to be?
- What kind of friend, sibling, or student do I want to be?
- What values will help me become that person?
When children start to internalize values, they develop emotional strength and coping mechanisms. Instead of reacting impulsively to distress, they learn to process disappointment, frustration, and setbacks in a healthy and constructive way.
