Meet Rose Sprinkle, the Author behind These Books for Conscious Moms

Author Rose Sprinkle

In today’s digital and social media age, it can be tough to teach your children what’s really important in life. I’ve always believed that books are a great way to impart lessons, perhaps because, after a life filled with my own traumas and tribulations, I am realizing how much I leaned on the lessons I learned from the books I read growing up. And boy, did I read.

I was thrilled to discover The Little Virtues earlier this year: this collection of eight books teaches everything from the importance of love to the need for faith and resilience. Evy and I started with Little Faith, a story about a girl who must climb an intimidating mountain to retrieve what she needs to save her grandma with no guarantee she will even find what she seeks. It’s a story about having resilience in the face of adversity, something I want my daughter to learn. Beautifully illustrated and inspirational to read, this story will grow with Evy as she gets older so I know we’ll enjoy it for many, many years to come.

I was curious about the author behind this lovely collection, so I sat down with Rose Sprinkle to find out a little more - and, wow, is her story relatable to so many of us.

How did you get into writing books for children, and what inspired this collection?

I started writing these books long before I had a family or children of my own. In high school, I told my mom one day I wanted to write a children's book so it was always a pipe dream, but what inspired this collection may be surprising or even seem unrelated. In my early 30s, I went through a mental health crisis from the traumatic and sudden loss of a best friend. I actually found her and tried to resuscitate her which resulted in me developing PTSD, although understanding and learning that was also a separate journey on its own.

I started writing these books as a means to heal and understand the beauty in that pain, and realize that we all feel these emotions. How can I find courage? How can I keep going? We all have trials and hard things that sometimes feel impossible to overcome and can be life changing. I think it would be easy to say something like, “i wanted a wholesome product for families,” but really there was just one thought that kept driving me as I was writing and that was, “I want people to know they're not alone and to prepare kids with the tools they need for a fighting chance when they later meet challenges in life.”

Although I don't think it's so much “later” anymore. When I wrote these books, social emotional learning for kids or gentle parenting weren't a thing. It was never heard of. And as I kept writing and publishing over the next 4 years I saw a boom of need and desire for these types of materials because kids are being forced to grow up way too fast with the things they deal with and it's affecting them. I think these books couldn't be more timely.

Which book was your first book? Why did you start with that virtue?

Little love was my first. I woke up crying from a nightmare I was having, and I just asked myself, “If I could say to someone in one sentence how I feel, what would I say?”

And the words came: “I have a hole in my heart.” I wrote the entire story in 30 min and the final manuscript only had one small change in it. 

I wrote that story first because my self worth had completely been destroyed. I felt like I had very little control over my life and felt very helpless that I could feel any joy again. But I didn't want to write a story about my specific circumstance. I wanted to write something that spoke to both my experience and everyone else's - that this is what it means to be human. I think it helped me realize how isolated I felt but that that wasn't the actual reality. It helped me reframe things in a much more healthy way.

Which book is your favorite, and why?

I deal with a lot of anxiety and perfectionism so Little Brave is the story that resonates with me the most. My favorite line is, “Little brave gave all that he could, no matter if his swing was bad or was good.”

I think we don't give ourselves enough credit for just showing up and trying. We always tend to focus on the end result, but we don’t see all of the failed attempts along the way. It's a fallacy our culture and human brains love to buy into when someone does something well that’s easy to them, and we call that brave. But it's not, and I think that’s a really damaging misunderstanding for kids to learn. But seeing someone try over and over again and continuously show up even when they're scared or there's no guarantee…now that's something I can admire.

The Illustrations are beautifully done. How did you pick an illustrator?

I literally just asked friends on Facebook if they knew people, haha. So my first illustrator was local, but I was moving at a pretty intense pace and illustrating books can be very exhausting. So I also used two other illustrators as well to give them all breaks. One was an old roommate from college. I was in the graphic design program, and she’s a fantastic watercolor illustrator, and the other was someone on Instagram that my original illustrator followed. They’ve all been super talented and dedicated to work with.

What is your hope for the impact of your collection?

My hope is to create a curriculum and community for parents with the books as a resource for them to help teach these concepts on a deeper level.  I would love one day to have an animated TV series or interactive education platform, but as far as I’m concerned, this is what I want to focus on for the next 20 years. And on a much more personal level, I hope if anything at the least to just have these stories be loved by my children. I just recently had our very first, a little girl, who I couldn’t be more in love with. And sharing these stories with her means the world to me.