Our Story

Some things are made because they should exist.

The Krewelings started with someone I love — a child whose big feelings arrived faster than the words to name them, or the ability to do anything with them. After a hard season in our family, it got harder. Watching it up close, I realized something that reorganized how I thought about all of it: we spend so much time teaching children what to do, and almost no time teaching them how to feel. More often, we teach the opposite — to tuck a feeling away, push it down, act like it isn’t there. Not to name it. Not to understand it. And certainly not to know it’s okay to feel it at all.

That’s what the Krewelings are for.

They’re twenty little characters, and each one carries a feeling a child already knows by heart — Gumbo the happy gator, Tavi the scared turtle, Hux the angry hedgehog, and all the rest. Giving a feeling a name, a face, and a friend to point to is often the first step toward a child saying “I feel like Cubby right now” instead of melting down, shutting down, or acting out. And once a child can name what’s happening inside, something quietly remarkable follows: they steady. A regulated child is a reachable child — ready to learn, ready to connect.

There’s a second reason I couldn’t not make these. The skills that help a child understand their own feelings are the same skills that help them understand a story — why a character does what they do, how a problem gets solved, how it all comes back together. The seeds of emotional literacy and the seeds of storytelling turn out to be the same seeds. I’ve spent my life around stories; it turns out I was always pointed here.

The Krewelings are built on the CASEL framework — the evidence-based approach to social emotional learning that schools across the country trust — so what feels like play is doing real, structured work underneath. But the heart of it is simpler than any framework: every feeling is welcome here. There’s no being perfect at this, for a child or a grown-up — we all had to learn it. And because no two children are the same, there are twenty different characters to find yourself in. There’s room for every kind of kid in this Krewe.

Thank you for being here. The Krewe is glad you came.

— Toni Causey · Creator, The Krewelings | Cajun Ink Designs, LLC