Carlisle nursery nurse pens new book

Rebecca has shoulder-length brown hair and is smiling. She is wearing a black and white striped top and black dungarees — Children’s author Rebecca Tyson, from Carlisle

A new Carlisle author hopes to reassure children that it’s okay for everyone to have their unique differences.

Rebecca Tyson has been developing ideas to support children’s health and wellbeing throughout her 15-year career working as a qualified nursery nurse and within
pre-school settings.

Born in Carlisle, where Rebecca lives with her husband and three children, Rebecca has spent the past three years pursuing her creative ambition to write her first children’s picture book, based around the characters she has created – the Flamingo Friends.

Flamingo Flockdown by Rebecca Tyson is her first publication and introduces the reader to a special group of friends who share their feelings, work through their worries and see the very best in each other.

Directly addressing the challenges little ones have had to face due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the children’s book provides adults and children alike with the opportunity to reflect on some of the very difficult situations we have worked through over the past 24 months and encourages talk and reflection to help come out the other side of the pandemic and heal children’s worries.

The front cover of Flamingo Flockdown — Flamingo Flockdown

Rebecca has completed several learning courses to specialise in children’s mental health, well-being and mindfulness. She has many other stories which the Flamingo Friends want to share. In fact, this wasn’t ever really intended to be the first story, but then the pandemic hit.

“The Flamingo Friends are a group of characters who each have their own individual personalities and traits,” said Rebecca.

“Through these stories, I want to help children realise and understand it is ok for everyone to have their unique differences. For example, Maria is a worrier, but her worrying is a recognised feeling that we all experience so it’s great to be talked about.

“Flavia is very confident and Freddie extremely shy – I hope I can elaborate on the friends’ differences in future stories, including how (on closer inspection) they all look wonderfully different too.

“My original idea was based around flamingos being very social animals, they are always together and live together in such large groups. They put their heads together to help each other work things out.

“When the pandemic happened, I thought that was the end of the idea, we couldn’t even see each other let alone put our heads together but then I realised, there was a story within the Flamingo Friends about this – they needed to manage their way through the lockdowns too.”