A Child's Garden of Emotions

FOR years, publishers have been flooding the market with adult books on how to be mentally healthy. Now, publishers are turning to the same subject for young readers--some of them surprisingly good books. One of the most appealing is Terry Berger's I Have Feelings (Behavioral Publications; $3.95), the fourth of seven volumes approved by child-development experts from Columbia University's Teachers College, Harvard Medical School and the National Institute of Mental Health.

Feelings shows four-to-nine-year-olds how to cope with their emotions--pride, shame, jealousy, loneliness, disappointment. Author Berger first poses the problem: "When I get home, Barry calls to tell me that he can't come over. I have no one to play with." Beneath a moody black-and-white photograph, the emotion is defined: "I feel lonely." The solution is printed alone on a full page: "After a while I get a book and some toys. I find that I can have fun when I am alone too."

Other situations are handled in equally deft fashion. The child tries out for the ball team. "Only two boys didn't make it," he says. "I was one of them. I felt like nothing." According to father, "if I practiced I would get better, but even so, not everyone can make the team. You don't have to be the best to feel like something." Similarly, the youngster overhears his mother and father fighting. But his sister assures him that "our parents still love us, even if they can't get along sometimes." When he defends a friend who is being teased by schoolmates, he feels brave. Even though he may get hurt, he decides, he must "take a chance if I feel that I'm doing the right thing."

Feelings confines its examples to everyday events. Earlier books in the series explain how it feels to be retarded and what it is like to be The Man of the House when the father is away on a business trip. Other volumes deal with bed-wetting and thumbsucking, with solving problems by talking about them and--in My Grandpa Died Today--with facing death.

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