Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. If you ever, as a kid, felt bad about your body,

it sucks, right? We know, too, that adults can also suffer from these feelings and that they would

not want their kids to feel this way. But sometimes, parents can impart their body image issues onto their kids unwittingly. So today,

we've got two books about kids and body image. Up ahead, a book aimed at tweens, but first,

apparently kids even younger than that can have issues with their body. Susan Verde's book,

Body Beautiful, is for those really little ones. And in this interview with

NPR Scott Detrow, Verde talked about why she spent a large chunk of her book talking about how

cool and awesome and kind of magical our bodies really are. That's up ahead.

Studies show that kids as young as three years old can have body image concerns.

Author Susan Verde was an elementary school teacher who saw kids forming judgments about their

bodies very early on and wanted to introduce them to a concept she calls body beautiful.

So she wrote a picture book with that name.

The opening line of the book is, Do You Know Your Body is Beautiful?

Susan Verdei joins us now to talk about the answer she's heard to that question and the reception to her book. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Where did this idea first come from?

Well, body image is something that I have personally struggled with for a long time.

And, you know, as someone who writes children's books that I think about supporting kids through a lot of their difficult emotions or negative self-talk.

And body image and your body is one of those areas.

And I just felt like if I could get to kids a little

bit earlier, maybe we could interrupt some of these concerns and thoughts that they have at such a

young age. We're talking about really young kids in a lot of these, in a lot of these examples.

Is there one specific moment that you recall being surprised by the way a younger

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