Every parent of a bitten child knows the moment the stitches come out and everyone exhales. Fewer are warned about what comes three months later, when the scar has faded and the child still won’t go in the backyard.
That gap — between the wound that heals and the fear that lingers — is where Jason Plotkin’s new picture book lives.
The Pickle, the Patch, and the Puppy follows Stevie, a boy whose pickle-loving, backyard-running childhood is interrupted by a frightening encounter with a dog named Bo. The bite heals. The fear takes longer. With his parents beside him and a tool called the Bravery Ladder, Stevie learns that courage isn’t the absence of fear but the decision to move anyway.
Plotkin writes from both sides of it. He was bitten by a dog at age five. “The wound healed in a couple of weeks,” he says. “The fear took years. I crossed the street when I saw a leash. Nobody meant to overlook it — life just moved on, and I didn’t have words for what stayed behind.”
He found them as a personal injury attorney representing families whose children have been hurt in dog bite incidents. He is Chief Executive Officer and Managing Attorney of The Pinder Plotkin Legal Team in Baltimore, Maryland, and the bestselling author of Crash Course: To Recovery and Beyond.
“Parents come in focused on the medical bills and the scar, which is exactly where a parent’s mind should go first,” Plotkin says. “Then a few months later they mention it almost apologetically — he used to love our neighbor’s golden retriever and now he won’t look at it. That’s the injury nobody photographs. I’ve seen it in family after family, and I lived it myself.”
The Bravery Ladder at the center of the story is a real strategy, not a storybook device. Rather than asking a child to “get over it,” a family builds it together, one rung at a time: look at a photo of a dog. Watch one across the park. Stand near a calm, leashed dog with a parent’s hand on your shoulder.
“Each rung is small enough to survive and big enough to matter,” says Plotkin. “Kids who climb it aren’t just recovering from a dog bite. They’re learning something about fear that serves them the rest of their lives.”
Families of faith, he adds, bring something to that climb he has watched carry children through. “The prayer at the bedside, the church folks who show up and stay an hour — that’s part of the healing, not separate from it. A child needs to know they aren’t alone in the dark.”
His message to parents in the middle of it is simple. “Your child’s fear is normal, and it’s treatable. You don’t have to rush them. Small brave steps count.”
Scan the QR code to download a free printable Bravery Journal for your family.
Learn more at www.pickleandthepuppy.com.
—Jason Plotkin is a Maryland attorney and the author of The Pickle, the Patch, and the Puppy, a picture book born from his own childhood dog bite and written for families helping a scared child find the way back to brave.”
