About Us

The Author

My name is Lauren Snailham.  I am a Clinical Psychologist working in private practice in Durban, Kwazulu Natal, South Africa.  I work with children, adolescence and adults with a variety of psychological difficulties.  These mostly include anxiety, depression, trauma, divorce, child abuse, bullying, low self-esteem, loss and bereavement, ADHD, behaviour problems and personality issues.

My work includes assessment, play therapy, psychotherapy and psycho-education.  As I work with many children I am always on the look out for new creative techniques and activities that I can use in play therapy in the hope that I can help children cope with these life situations.  In doing so I have purchased many story books from abroad to treat anger problems,  encopresis, trauma etc., but I have found them to be to long, to advanced for our population and to vague.  This is when I began creating my own stories and found them to be really useful for the children I was seeing.  At first I would tell the story with actions and expressions as they were not in book form yet.  Some of the stories are used more often than others but this usually depended on the need of the children that I was treating.  Some of the stories are used individually and sometimes I may use two of them (as some of them overlap).

I have had a lot of fun creating these stories and using them in therapy with the children I have treated and I am glad to be sharing them with others who work with children. I have also seen first hand the positive effects these stories have in helping children cope with the unique challenges and problems they are faced with, from loss, anxiety, abuse and bullying to behaviour and personality issues.

I chose to do the illustrations in the books as I have always enjoyed art although my ability to draw was put to the test creating these books, but also because I wanted to keep the pictures as in line with the content as much as possible and had already created the images in my head.

Delyce Knowles has put the content and illustration into book form and readable format, she handles the queries, book orders and their distribution.  Delyce has been an essential part of this project.