I need help finding a children’s book, I can’t remember what it’s called!
It’s about a little village where all the people have little fuzzy creatures that sit on their shoulders. They look like fuzzy balls with eyes, and come in all different colors. These creatures make the people happy and build their self esteem. Then the people get greedy and start taking each other’s creatures to the point where the whole village is unhappy. They realize this and begin to share the creatures, the village is happy again. Moral of the story: when you take someone else’s confidence, you feel worse too. Published in 1960’s – 1980’s, perhaps.
Any help would be appreciated! Thank you!
The creatures sound a lot like the “warm fuzzies” of the Transactional Analysis for kids books which were popular in the late 60s early 70s. The general gist was that if you couldn’t get “warm fuzzies” then you tended to collect “cold pricklies” instead. There were a few levels of these books. T.A. For Tots is probably the more story-like one that might what you are looking for. T.A. for Kids was, if I remember correctly, a more straightforward “here’s how T.A. works” than a parable or story approach, though it might have had stories in it too.
Oh, turns out there were also a couple of actual story books based on TA, one of which might be what you are looking for:
Fuzzies, by Richard Lessor
The Original Warm Fuzzy Tale by Claude Steiner
That’s it! The Original Warm Fuzzy Tale is the book I remember! Thank you for the speedy response, this is great! I appreciate the background info as well. I will be recommending this website to others in the future! Thank you, thank you!