What do you do with a problem by Kobi Yamada (2016)

This picture book (Kobi Yamada, illustrated by Mae Besom, Compendium, 2016)  earned a spot as a New York Times bestseller and picked up the Christopher Award, the Moonbeam Children's Book Award, and the National Indie Excellence  It is a companion to Yamada and Besom's earlier hit, What Do You Do With an Idea?

Plot

A boy wakes up one day with a problem. He doesn't name this problem, and that choice is the book's smartest move: the reader supplies whatever problem fits their own life. He tries to wish this problem away, then to ignore it, then to hide from it. The problem persists, and each avoidance makes this problem grow larger and darker in the illustrations, rendered as a swelling black cloud that trails the boy through gray, drained landscapes. Eventually he runs out of places to hide, turns to face this cloud, and discovers that the problem contains an opportunity. Besom's palette shifts from muted grays to bright color at that turn, and the final pages show the boy walking forward with confidence he lacked at the start.

Themes

Avoidance amplifies fear. The book's central claim is that a problem left unexamined grows heavier in the mind than it would in reality. That claim tracks with what psychologists call the exaggeration effect of avoidance, and Yamada dramatizes this idea visually rather than lecturing about it.

Courage is a decision, not a feeling. The boy doesn't stop being afraid before he turns around. He turns around anyway. This distinction gives the book more staying power than a simpler "just be brave" message would.

Problems double as opportunities. The book's final reveal, that the cloud held something valuable inside, lands as earned because of the buildup across the earlier pages rather than as a bolted-on moral.

Commentary

The ambiguity of the problem (never named, never illustrated as a specific object like a bully or a test) is the book's central design choice, and it works because of that restraint. A parent reading this book with a child facing a bully can apply the metaphor directly; all of us could apply the same metaphor to a work deadline or a hard conversation we are avoiding.

The book resolves cleanly: face the problem, and it turns into opportunity. Real problems don't always resolve that neatly, and a few reviewers raised the same concern about oversimplification. The critique is fair for adult readers looking for an instructive framework;  the book is aimed primarily at children ages five through eight, where a clean resolution serves the pedagogical purpose better than nuance would.

Lessons

1. Naming a problem, even silently to oneself, is the first step toward addressing it.

2. Avoidance has a compounding cost; the problem you dodge today gets harder to face tomorrow.

3. Facing a problem doesn't require overcoming fear.

4. A problem often carries much-needed information, not just discomfort you want to escape.

5. The size of a problem in your head is not a reliable measure of the size of a problem in reality.

Stack-Ranked Key Takeaways

1. Face it early. The single biggest driver of the story's tension is delay. This lesson ranks first because every other lesson depends on it.

2. Avoidance inflates the problem. The visual metaphor of the growing cloud makes this point unmissable, and it's the book's most memorable teaching device.

3. Courage precedes confidence, not the other way around. The boy acts before he feels ready, and that ordering is the most quietly radical idea in the book.

4. Problems can hold value. This lesson is the payoff, not the mechanism, of the story.

5. A problem doesn't need a name to be addressed. This one is a structural device for the reader, not a life lesson to apply directly.

I'd recommend this book to a parent looking for a gentle way to open a conversation with a child about a hard situation. The book is short, the metaphor is simple, and that simplicity is exactly why it works as well as it does. 5/5 Stars