The Tale of the Swamp Monster

As a practicing pediatrician, I consul parents about nighttime fears and bedtime routines on a weekly basis, but the impact of that fear never became real to me until my 4 year old became terrified of going to bed. I wrote “The Swamp Monster” in reaction to my toddler’s fear of bed time. Although this theme has been explored in children’s literature many times before, I think this book has a unique twist in that I have attempted to weave children’s fear of the unknown with the realization that racial (or in this case species) differences are not something to be feared, but that at our most basic, we are fundamentally the same.