In this conversation, psychologist and author Dr. Dale Atkins discusses grandparents, nature, children’s wellbeing, screen culture, storytelling, and the future of illustrated books.
I could never imagine a time when illustrated books would become a rarity. Like most Gen Xers, I was obsessed with stories that came alive through artistic illustrations. Screens and digital graphics may have changed that storybook world, but art has a life of its own because it is your deepest creative instinct.
Discovering Dr Dale Atkins’ books was like reclaiming a piece of my childhood. Her thoughtfully crafted books, focused on connecting children with their roots, ancestors, grandparents and, above all, Nature, are a delightful addition to any child’s library, and perhaps adults’ too.
I’ve read two of her books, The Turquoise Butterfly and Dear Deer. Charmingly illustrated by Amelina Jones, these books highlight the web of life, and promote harmonious relationships.
The Turquoise Butterfly made me wistfully look back at my childhood and the regretful fact: I never knew my grandparents, nor experienced their loving influence.
Dear Deer is a reminder that we are inseparable from Nature. Over the last few years, I have rediscovered my love for Nature. Written in the form of a letter, the book celebrates the colours, scents, sounds, beauty, and quiet healing power that we have forgotten to tap into. Both these books stem from Dr Atkins’ personal experiences.
A licensed psychologist, educator, storyteller and nature enthusiast with more than 40 years of experience focusing on families, wellness, managing stress, and living a balanced, meaningful life, Dr Dale Atkins has a private psychology practice in New York City. A resident of Connecticut, Dr Atkins’ work reflects her belief in the healing power of storytelling, the wisdom of nature, and the lasting strength of intergenerational connection.
In Conversation With Dr Dale Atkins
- In India and most ancient cultures, grandparents are normally associated with stars. How did you come up with the idea of connecting a turquoise butterfly with a grandparent?
The connection between the turquoise butterfly and Grandma Sylvia is deeply personal, rooted in family legacy and universal human experiences of grief and remembrance.
The character of Grandma Sylvia is directly inspired by my late mother, for whom the butterfly held profound personal significance. She loved these creatures during her lifetime.
Whenever a butterfly appears, whether fluttering through a garden or catching our eye in an image, her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren feel her immediate presence. It is a living, breathing connection to her memory.
While writing this book, I discovered that our family’s experience is far from unique. Across diverse cultures, the butterfly is one of the most widely recognized symbols for loved ones who have died. This connection is deeply rooted in the creature’s biological journey. The butterfly undergoes radical metamorphosis. It serves as a perfect metaphor for:
• Transition and Transformation: Moving from one state of being to another.
• Struggle and Renewal: Overcoming the confinement of the chrysalis to find new life.
• Endurance of Hope: Believing in beauty after a period of darkness.
Ultimately, the turquoise butterfly represents the endurance of the human spirit. It embodies the comforting idea that love does not vanish when life ends; instead, it simply changes shape, existing energetically in the world around us. This provides a profound source of comfort for anyone seeking an eternal connection to those they have lost.
While some cultures look to the stars, the moon, specific birds, or unique animals to remember their ancestors, for Grandma Sylvia’s family, that eternal bond lives on the wings of a turquoise butterfly.
2. In a city-centric world, wildlife is reduced to boundaries. How can adults keep their children in sync with Nature, when they too are losing their connection with the natural world?
Nature is not a luxury for children. It is part of healthy human development. Even in highly urban places across India, the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, children need regular contact with the natural world to support emotional well-being, curiosity, focus, resilience, and a sense of wonder.
The challenge today is that both children and adults are increasingly disconnected from nature because of screens, indoor lifestyles, limited green space, and busy schedules. Children do not need wilderness to feel connected to nature.
Small, repeated experiences matter deeply. Especially in communities where children may carry stress early and often, nature can offer moments of restoration that are both simple and profound.
In urban settings, we can create small rituals around nature. Children remember rituals. Even brief, predictable experiences create emotional security and deepen attention.
Families everywhere can create simple nature rituals:
• Walk in a local park or neighbourhood regularly
• Watch the same tree change through the seasons
• Grow herbs or flowers on a balcony or windowsill
• Feed birds or notice butterflies and bees
• Look at the moon together each evening
• Collect leaves, stones, or seed pods
• Keep a simple weather or nature journal
• Simply observe pigeons, squirrels, insects, clouds, rain, and changing skies
Establish and/or visit:
• Community gardens
• Rooftop gardens
• Botanical gardens
• Urban parks and waterfronts
• Farmers markets
• Nature centres
Perhaps most importantly, children connect to nature when adults do. Curiosity is contagious.
Instead of saying, “Go outside,” we can accompany them and use language that invites discovery:
“What birds do you hear?”
“What changed since last week?”
“I wonder what lives under this rock?”
One of the greatest gifts nature offers children is freedom from constant performance and overstimulation.
3. Even during the holidays, children remain indoors, sometimes due to the heat, other times due to designated activities. What are the trends in America regarding children’s outdoor time?
In the United States, research suggests that many children now spend far more time indoors than previous generations. Screen time has increased significantly, while free outdoor play has decreased. Safety concerns, academic pressure, busy schedules, and digital entertainment all contribute to this shift.
Many parents today, wherever they live in the world, keep children highly scheduled with lessons, tutoring, camps, and indoor entertainment. While these activities can be valuable, children must have unstructured time outdoors for healthy emotional and physical development.
However, there is a growing movement among parents, schools, pediatricians, and mental health professionals encouraging more outdoor learning, nature play, gardening, hiking, camping, and “green time” to balance excessive screen exposure.
Nature supports attention, creativity, resilience, emotional regulation, and a sense of wonder that cannot be fully replicated on screens or indoors.
For many children growing up in cities, especially inner-city neighbourhoods where green space may be limited and daily stressors can be high, regular connection with nature is not simply a pleasant activity. It can be restorative, regulating, empowering, and deeply healing.
Richard Louv, the American journalist and author who coined the term “nature-deficit disorder,” described how excessive indoor living and screen-centred lifestyles may contribute to stress, anxiety, reduced attention, diminished creativity, and emotional disconnection in children.
Jonathan Haidt, American social psychologist and author, emphasizes that children need more real-world play, independence, movement, manageable risk, face-to-face interaction, and less constant digital stimulation.
These researchers remind parents that children do not thrive through screens, schedules, and constant performance alone. Children need opportunities to explore, imagine, move freely, engage their senses, tolerate uncertainty, and experience wonder. Nature helps provide all of this in ways that are deeply restorative and developmentally essential.
Even in cities, small rituals matter. A balcony garden in Mumbai, a walk through Central Park in New York, or feeding birds in London can help children feel connected to the living world.
Children need repeated opportunities to slow down, use their senses, experience awe, and feel that they are part of nature, not separate from it.
4. Your books are educational as well as endearing. How do you decide on a topic that resonates with current needs?
What guides me in choosing a topic is rarely a marketing trend or a sudden inspiration disconnected from life. My books emerge from paying attention: to the emotional climate around me, to what people are struggling with privately, to what is missing from public conversation, and to the questions I hear repeatedly in my office, seminars, media appearances, and everyday life.
I do not begin by asking, “What should I write?”
I begin by asking, “What is needed?” What pain, confusion, longing, or silence keeps appearing? What human experience is not being adequately explored with compassion, honesty, practicality, and hope? And perhaps most importantly, is this a subject where my professional experience, personal life experience, and perspective can genuinely contribute something meaningful?
My books have grown organically out of my life, my work, and my observations of society.
My early work, Families and their Hearing Impaired Children, which I edited and also contributed a chapter to about siblings, emerged from my professional work in the field of deafness and family systems.
Later, while serving as the advice columnist for WeddingChannel.com, I saw tremendous stress surrounding weddings. Brides often became consumed by perfection, pressure, family conflict, comparison, and expectations. Joy was getting lost. That realization inspired Wedding Sanity Savers: How to Handle the Stickiest Dilemmas, Scrapes, and Questions That Arise on the Road to Your Perfect Day.
My work with women in therapy revealed another painful cultural reality. So many women were trying to “do it all” flawlessly: career, marriage, parenting, caregiving, friendships, volunteerism, and community obligations. Self-care was often treated as indulgent rather than necessary. I saw exhaustion, guilt, imbalance, and quiet depletion. That awareness became Sanity Savers: Tips for Women to Live a Balanced Life.
To honor my mother and explore the profound emotional value of intergenerational relationships, I wrote my first children’s book, The Turquoise Butterfly. At its heart is the belief that love does not disappear. The story reflects resilience, reassurance, emotional inheritance, and the ways grandparents help children feel safe enough to face uncertainty and grow.
And finally, my lifelong love of nature underscored an increasing concern that many children were growing up disconnected from the natural world, substituting screen time for green time, I wrote my second children’s book, Dear Deer. Inspired by a deeply personal encounter in nature, the book encourages children to slow down, engage their senses, develop empathy, and rediscover that we are part of nature, not separate from it.
Looking back, I see that each book represents both observation and response. I notice what feels emotionally absent, under-discussed, or urgently needed in the culture. Then I ask myself whether I have something authentic, useful, compassionate, and hopeful to contribute. My books are not simply projects. They are responses to life as I witness it, professionally and personally.
5. How do we break the ‘screen time, all the time’ phenomenon?
I think many adults feel concerned and even a little heartbroken that so many children across the world are now experiencing nature primarily through screens instead of through their senses. But I do not believe the answer is guilt, criticism, or nostalgia for a different time.
Parents and educators today are navigating enormous pressures and a rapidly changing world. Technology is part of modern life, and it also offers many benefits. The goal is not to reject it, but to restore balance and help children remember that they are part of the living world, not separate from it.
Children do not need extraordinary wilderness experiences to develop a relationship with nature. They need repeated, meaningful contact with the natural world in ordinary ways.
- Watching clouds move across the sky.
- Listening to birds in the morning.
- Planting herbs on a windowsill.
- Walking slowly enough to notice ants carrying food or the shape of a leaf after the rain.
These moments may seem small, but they help develop curiosity, patience, sensory awareness, emotional regulation, empathy, and a feeling of belonging in the world.
In a world that is increasingly loud, fast, stimulating, and performance driven, the natural world offers something different. It does not demand perfection. It does not constantly evaluate or compare.
Nature teaches children to wonder, to observe, to wait, to ponder, and to tolerate uncertainty. A child watching a butterfly emerge or quietly noticing a deer in the woods is learning far more than facts about nature. They are learning presence.
Children are more likely to value nature when they see adults valuing it too. If a parent pauses to admire the moon, tends to a garden, walks without constantly looking at a phone, or expresses delight at the return of spring blossoms, children absorb that emotional orientation toward the world.
Educational institutions also have an important role to play. Outdoor classrooms, gardening projects, nature walks, observing seasonal changes, caring for living things, and integrating nature into storytelling, science, art, and reflection can help children feel connected rather than detached from the world around them.
One especially meaningful practice is encouraging children to go into nature and then write stories afterward, either about what they experienced or stories they imagine inspired by what they saw.
Storytelling helps children organize experience and make meaning from the world around them.
And yes, children still do read, especially when stories touch something emotionally meaningful and when adults make reading relational rather than transactional.
Reading aloud remains one of the most powerful ways adults and children bond. A child sitting beside a parent, grandparent, or teacher listening to a story is not only developing literacy. They are developing attention, imagination, emotional understanding, memory, and connection.
6. How will AI impact children’s books, especially illustrated ones? Are they going to be a lost art?
Believe me, I wish I knew the answer. Time will tell. At this moment, these are my thoughts (with some wishful thinking) about “the unknown” influence of AI on children’s illustrated books.
I would like to believe that children’s books, especially illustrated ones, will become a lost art because of AI. In fact, I think beautifully created children’s books may become even more emotionally valuable in the years ahead precisely because they are human made.
AI may make it easier for people to generate images quickly, experiment with story ideas, or produce books more rapidly and inexpensively. But abundance is not the same as emotional depth, wisdom, originality, or soul.
What children respond to most deeply is emotional authenticity. A memorable children’s book carries the imprint of human experience. It reflects observation, love, longing, humor, tenderness, grief, curiosity, delight, fear, reassurance, and relationships. Children may not articulate that consciously, but they feel it. We all do.
I think there may be a renewed appreciation for illustrated books that feel personal, tactile, thoughtful, and emotionally layered. Original artwork, distinctive illustration styles, and stories rooted in lived experience may become even more treasured in a world increasingly saturated with fast generated content.
A lovingly illustrated children’s book invites children to pause, notice, imagine, and wonder. The illustrations are not merely decorative. They help children develop visual literacy, emotional understanding, symbolic thinking, attention, and imagination.
At the same time, I think AI can also be used thoughtfully. It can (and already does) help educators create supplemental materials, support accessibility, encourage storytelling exercises, or assist children in experimenting creatively. Like most tools, its impact depends on how humans choose to use it.
But I do not think children will stop needing stories created from the heart. Nor do I think they will stop needing illustrations that reflect a particular artist’s way of seeing the world. Children hunger for connection, meaning, beauty, reassurance, and imagination. Those needs are timeless.
Perhaps in the future, truly human storytelling will become even more precious.
7. What more would you be penning in the coming times?
I am very intrigued by the revival of the Osprey. I see it as one of the most successful conservation stories. I live near a park (where Dear Deer was born) and have witnessed the resurgence of the Osprey population. It was nearly wiped out in the 1950s as a result of DDT induced eggshell thinning.
The Osprey population diminished by nearly 90 per cent in the 1960s and 1970s. After that pesticide was banned and humans became actively involved in their conservation, they are now flourishing. I would like to write a story about an osprey family and what children can learn about being stewards of the environment.
I hope all the readers will be engaged not only in the stories I write but in reflecting on their own lives to discover how my stories may impact them and those they love.
Ambica Gulati is a journalist and editor whose work explores global affairs, travel, environment, and the intuitive arts. From short stories to wellness mantras, she focuses on meaningful experiences in a complex world. She has authored books for children, a series of six books on Monuments of the World published by Om Books International.
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