Best Children's Books About Anger Management (Ages 3–7)

Super Silver Academy is reader-supported. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no extra cost to you.

1. When Sophie Gets Angry — Really, Really Angry — by Molly Bang

The classic, and still the one that gets closest to what rage actually feels like from the inside. Sophie's sister grabs her gorilla, Sophie explodes in a red-orange blaze of colour, she runs, she cries, she climbs a tree, and then she comes home. What makes it work is that nobody fixes her. She fixes herself, slowly, and the family is still there when she gets back. Children who feel ashamed of their own anger tend to soften at this one. View When Sophie Gets Angry on Amazon →

2. Grumpy Monkey — by Suzanne Lang

Jim Panzee wakes up in a bad mood and every animal in the jungle tells him to cheer up, sit up straight, think happy thoughts. None of it helps, obviously. It is very funny, and it makes a point most books for this age miss: sometimes the useful thing is to let the feeling be there rather than argue with it. Good for the child whose anger arrives as a low all-day grump rather than a bang. View Grumpy Monkey on Amazon →

3. Ravi's Roar — by Tom Percival

Ravi is the smallest in his family, he has had enough of it, and he turns into a tiger. Then he discovers that being a tiger means nobody wants to play with you. Percival's Big Bright Feelings books are built for exactly this age, and this one is the most useful of them for anger because the fallout is social rather than moral: the roar does not make Ravi wicked, it makes him lonely. View Ravi's Roar on Amazon →

4. Breathing is My Superpower — by Alicia Ortego

The practical one. Sofia learns to notice the feeling rising and use her breath to bring it back down, in short rhyme that small children pick up quickly. It is closer to a technique than a story, which is a weakness if you want literature and a strength at half past four on a bad afternoon. Pairs well with any of the books above, which name the feeling but do not tell you what to do with your body. View Breathing is My Superpower on Amazon →

5. How to Train Your Amygdala — by Anna Housley Juster

For the child who wants to know why. It explains the alarm-bell part of the brain in language a five-year-old can follow, and frames calming down as training rather than behaving. Best at the older end of this range, or for a kid who responds better to "here is what is happening inside you" than to a talking monkey. View How to Train Your Amygdala on Amazon →

6. The Most Magnificent Thing — by Ashley Spires

A girl sets out to build the most magnificent thing and it comes out wrong, then wrong again, until she gets angry enough to smash it and stomp off. That page is the reason the book belongs on an anger list rather than only a perseverance one: it shows the particular fury that arrives when your hands will not do what your head can see. Her walk around the block is the bit worth pointing at afterwards. View The Most Magnificent Thing on Amazon →

7. My Mouth Is a Volcano! — by Julia Cook

Louis's words build up in his belly, rumble, and erupt straight over whoever happens to be talking. It is usually shelved under interrupting, but it is really about the split second between a feeling arriving and a mouth opening, which is exactly where a lot of family rows start. The "wiggle and count" trick gives a child something to do with the pressure instead of firing it at their sister. View My Mouth Is a Volcano on Amazon →

8. Sharing Silver — for one memorable page on why anger comes back around

This is a book about sharing and giving, not an anger book, and anger gets one page of it. It earns its place because that page does something most anger books for this age skip: it shows the consequence. Silver the superhero pup is walking Bandit through the forest when they hear shouting. Angry Ann the ant is furious about a game of chase, she snaps at everyone, the whole anthill joins in, and the game she wanted to play ends in a big fight. Nobody lectures Ann. The story just lets a child watch her temper cost her the thing she cared about. Sharing Silver has nothing on calming down, naming the feeling or what to do mid-meltdown, so use the books above for that.

Then Silver hands over the image that does the work later. Anger is like mud on a trampoline: jump on it, and the mud splashes right onto you. That sentence has survived in our house longer than any calm-down technique we ever tried, because it is funny, it is physical, and a small child can picture it. It also sits inside the book's bigger idea, that the world reflects back what you give, so anger is not treated as a bad feeling to be squashed but as something that has a direction and lands somewhere.

“Anger is like mud on a trampoline. Jump on it, and the mud splashes right onto you.”

Sharing Silver — a superhero training story about sharing, giving and what happens to your big feelings when you throw them at people, for ages 3–7. Anger gets one page, and the Angry Ann line is the one you will end up quoting.

View Sharing Silver on Amazon

There is a reason the picture matters more than the instruction. Young children are still years away from reliably managing strong feelings on their own, and developmental psychologists describe them as learning it through co-regulation: borrowing a calm adult's steadiness first, and only gradually producing their own. Psychiatrist Dan Siegel popularised the phrase "name it to tame it" for the first half of that, the idea that putting words to a feeling helps take some heat out of it. A story does both jobs at once. It names the feeling while your child is calm enough to hear it, and it leaves you a shared phrase to reach for when they are not.

If you want to see the writing before you buy, you can read a free sample of Sharing Silver, or browse the quotes from the book.

9. The Rabbit Listened — by Cori Doerrfeld

Taylor builds something wonderful, birds knock it flat, and one animal after another turns up to tell him what he should do about it: shout, laugh it off, get revenge. None of it helps. The rabbit just comes and sits close until Taylor is ready to talk. This is the one to read for yourself as much as for your child, because it is a quiet argument against fixing a furious four-year-old with advice. View The Rabbit Listened on Amazon →

10. Waiting Is Not Easy! — by Mo Willems

Piggie has a surprise for Gerald, and Gerald has to wait for it, which he does with escalating, whole-page groaning. Half the anger in a young child's day is the anger of waiting, and no book catches it more accurately or more cheaply. It is also genuinely funny read aloud, so it does its work while everyone is laughing rather than being taught. View Waiting Is Not Easy on Amazon →

11. The Squirrels Who Squabbled — by Rachel Bright

Cyril and Bruce both want the last pine cone of the season, and neither will let go, so they chase it over a waterfall and nearly lose everything including each other. Rachel Bright and Jim Field make the squabble ridiculous enough to laugh at, which is the point. It lands closest to Angry Ann of anything else on this list: two furious characters, one lost afternoon, and a lesson nobody has to spell out. View The Squirrels Who Squabbled on Amazon →

12. When Charlie McButton Lost Power — by Suzanne Collins

Written years before The Hunger Games, this is a rhyming story about a boy whose computer dies in a power cut and whose fury sends him hunting a battery, which he takes from his little sister. Any parent who has turned a tablet off mid-game knows this exact meltdown. What rescues Charlie is not a talking-to, it is discovering he quite likes playing with his sister. View When Charlie McButton Lost Power on Amazon →

13. Enemy Pie — by Derek Munson

Not every angry feeling is a storm; some of it sets, and a child decides another child is the enemy. Here a boy hands his dad the name of his worst enemy and gets a recipe with one strange condition: he must spend a whole day with him first. It is pitched a little older than the rest of this list, roughly five and up, so save it for the age when grudges start lasting longer than the afternoon. View Enemy Pie on Amazon →

The 13 books at a glance

How to choose, and how to actually use it

Match the book to the shape of your child's anger rather than to the word. A child who erupts and then feels terrible needs Sophie. A child who is grumpy for three hours needs Jim Panzee. A child who lashes out at a sibling and loses the game needs Angry Ann. A child who wants a plan needs the breathing book.

• Blows up, then feels awful: When Sophie Gets Angry, Ravi's Roar
• Grumpy all day for no reason: Grumpy Monkey
• Furious at a task that won't work: The Most Magnificent Thing
• Words fire out before thinking: My Mouth Is a Volcano!, Sharing Silver
• Rages at waiting, sharing or the screen going off: Waiting Is Not Easy!, The Squirrels Who Squabbled, When Charlie McButton Lost Power

There is a reason it is worth being this specific. Researchers use the term emotional granularity for how finely someone can tell their feelings apart, and the psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett's work suggests that people who distinguish between frustrated, disappointed, left out and furious tend to handle those states better than people for whom everything is simply "bad". Small children start with one enormous word. Thirteen stories about thirteen different angry moments are, in practice, thirteen chances to hand over a more precise one. Precision is what lets a child eventually say "I'm not angry, I'm just tired of waiting".

Then read it when nothing is wrong. Read it four or five times, until the characters are family. The whole point is that later, in the middle of a storm, you have something to point at that is not a correction: what happened to the mud on the trampoline? What did Sophie do when she needed to be on her own? A phrase you both already know does not feel like being told off, and that is most of the difference.

For the wider picture, see our guide to emotional regulation in preschoolers, or the pillar guide to raising a kind, sharing friend. If the anger tends to flare between brothers and sisters, sibling rivalry help is the more specific page.