Best Books About Empathy for Kids (Ages 3–8)

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.

Empathy books get bought in a particular week. Usually there has been an incident. Somebody laughed at a cousin who fell over, or carried on playing while a friend cried two feet away, and you found yourself asking "how do you think that made her feel?" and getting a shrug back. The shrug is the reason this list exists, and it is worth knowing that the shrug is often honest.

The feeling half of empathy turns up early. Toddlers get upset when somebody else is upset, and they will post a blanket or a favourite toy at a crying adult without being asked. The thinking half takes longer. Working out that another person can believe something different from what you believe is a separate skill, and psychologists call it theory of mind. The classic test for it is the false-belief task, first run by Heinz Wimmer and Josef Perner in 1983 and made famous in the Sally-Anne version by Simon Baron-Cohen, Alan Leslie and Uta Frith in 1985: a doll puts a marble in a basket, leaves the room, somebody else moves it, and the child is asked where the doll will look for it. Younger children say the new hiding place, because they know where it is and cannot yet imagine somebody who doesn't. Children typically begin passing it somewhere around four or five. So a three-year-old who seems oblivious to a friend's face usually is not being cold. The machinery is still being built, and reading about other people's insides is one of the things that builds it.

1. Sharing Silver: the one that shows a child their own behaviour from the outside ⭐ Top Pick

Bandit is a dog who is always up to something, and he opens the book raiding a beehive and getting stung for it. Silver the Super Pup does not sit him down and explain how other animals feel. He walks him around Friendship Forest and lets him watch. Olivia the owl gives her music away and the forest gives back to her. Benny builds a waterwheel that helps everybody. Greedy Gus the goat clutches his bag of cookies, snaps "Mine! All mine!" at anyone who comes near, and ends up sitting alone with the crumbs while the others walk past carrying honey and strawberries. Nobody tells Bandit what any of them are feeling. He works it out by looking. That is the move a child has to learn, and it is a far easier move to practise on a goat than on the sibling you are currently furious with. Sharing Silver then gives Bandit the line the whole book is built around.

“The world is like a mirror. It reflects back what you give.”

Sharing Silver: a superhero training story about sharing and giving, for ages 3–7. Top pick for empathy because the child in the story is the one who has to notice, and the reader gets to notice alongside him.

View Sharing Silver on Amazon

What earns it the top spot on an empathy list rather than a kindness one: Bandit is never the villain. He is a dog who does selfish things, sees what they cost the animals around him, and changes his mind on his own. If your own child was the one who grabbed at the party last weekend, that distinction matters, because a child who feels accused stops listening and a child watching somebody else get it wrong keeps watching. Our four-year-old worked out what had happened to Gus a page before I got there. You can read a sample of Sharing Silver first, and the everyday version of this is in how to teach a child empathy.

2. The Rabbit Listened by Cori Doerrfeld

Taylor builds something magnificent out of blocks and a flock of birds knocks it down. Then the animals queue up with advice. The chicken wants to talk about it, the bear says get angry, the elephant says remember it, the hyena laughs, the ostrich says hide from it, and none of it is what Taylor needs. The rabbit says nothing at all. It just moves closer and stays. This is the most useful book on the list, because it answers the question a child actually gets stuck on, which is not "how does she feel" but "what am I supposed to do about it". Doerrfeld draws on near-empty pages, so there is one small figure and one animal and nothing else competing. A New York Times bestseller and a 2019 Charlotte Huck Honor book. It works from about three, and it is quietly aimed at the adult reading it too. View The Rabbit Listened on Amazon →

3. Last Stop on Market Street by Matt de la Peña

CJ and his grandmother get the bus across town after church, and CJ spends most of the ride complaining. Why don't we have a car, why doesn't he have what the other boys have, why do they have to go there. His nana answers every complaint by pointing at somebody: the man with the guitar, the blind man who hears the bus differently, the butterfly in a jar. By the last stop CJ is looking at the same street she is. This is the perspective-taking book on the list, and the only one where the person a child learns to see is a stranger rather than a friend. Matt de la Peña and illustrator Christian Robinson won the Newbery Medal for it in 2016, along with a Caldecott Honor and a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor, an unusual set for a picture book. Amazon lists it at 2 to 6 years, though the questions it raises land better from about five. View Last Stop on Market Street on Amazon →

4. Grumpy Monkey by Suzanne Lang

Jim Panzee wakes up in a bad mood on a perfectly nice day and every animal in the jungle arrives to fix him. Straighten your back, smile, swing on a vine, eat a banana, cheer up. None of it works, because there is nothing to fix, and eventually Norman the gorilla sits down next to him and is grumpy too. I put this on an empathy list because most children's first instinct with a sad friend is to jolly them out of it, and that is the whole jungle's mistake here, and the book makes that funny instead of preachy. Max Lang's illustrations carry the joke. Amazon lists it at 2 to 5 years and preschool to grade 2, and it pairs neatly with the books about anger list if the big feelings in your house are your child's own. View Grumpy Monkey on Amazon →

5. Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes

Chrysanthemum loves her name until she starts school, where Victoria informs her it is too long, it scarcely fits on her name tag, and she is named after a flower. She wilts. The book follows the damage home and back again over several days, which is what makes it the best book here on the subject of words: a child can see that one comment at nine in the morning was still hurting at bedtime. Henkes lets Chrysanthemum's parents be wonderful about it without the teasing stopping, and Mrs Twinkle solves it sideways. Read this one when the incident was verbal rather than physical. Listed at 2 to 6 years and preschool to grade 3. View Chrysanthemum on Amazon →

6. Enemy Pie by Derek Munson

A boy's perfect summer is ruined by Jeremy Ross, who moved in down the street and is officially the enemy. Dad says he has a recipe for enemy pie, but it only works if you spend one whole day being nice to the enemy first. You can see where this goes, and so can a six-year-old about halfway through, which does not spoil it at all. This is the book about deciding somebody is bad before you know them, and it is the one I would reach for when a child has written off a classmate. A Reading Rainbow book. Amazon lists it at 5 to 8 years, kindergarten to grade 3, and it is the oldest-skewing title on this list. View Enemy Pie on Amazon →

7. A Sick Day for Amos McGee by Philip C. Stead

Amos is a zookeeper who spends every day giving each animal exactly what it needs: chess with the elephant, races with the tortoise, a handkerchief for the rhinoceros who has a runny nose. Then Amos gets a cold and stays home, and the animals catch the bus to his house and do all of it back. The gentleness is the point. Nobody is unkind anywhere in this book, so it is the one to read with a child who is already tender-hearted and just needs to practise noticing what a particular person needs rather than what people generally like. Erin E. Stead won the Caldecott Medal for the illustrations in 2011. Listed at 2 to 5 years, and it makes a good bedtime read because nothing in it is loud. View A Sick Day for Amos McGee on Amazon →

8. Hug by Jez Alborough

Bobo the chimp wanders through the jungle watching every other animal being hugged by its mother and says one word: hug. That is nearly the entire text. By the time Bobo's face crumples, a toddler who cannot follow a plot has still understood what is happening, because Alborough draws feelings enormous and puts nothing else on the page. This is the entry point for the one-and-two-year-olds who are too young for everything else here, and it is on the list because empathy starts as recognising a face, long before it becomes a conversation. Amazon lists it at 1 to 3 years. View Hug on Amazon →

How to read an empathy book so it does something

Read it the first time with no teaching in it at all. Children can hear a lesson coming from two pages away, and you can watch them switch off when it arrives.

From the second reading, stop once. One page, the one where somebody's face changes, and one question: how do you think he feels right now? Then take whatever you get, including "I don't know" and including the answer that makes you wince, and leave it there. The aim is a child who is willing to guess at somebody else's insides out loud, and correcting the first guesses trains them out of guessing.

The part that matters most happens away from the book. When the real version turns up on an ordinary Tuesday, name it: "you saw that she was on her own and you went over". A child who hears their own empathy described starts to recognise it as a thing they do. That, plus the same three books read twenty times rather than twenty books read once, is most of the method.

If you want to go wider on the theme, the picture books about kindness list covers what to do once a child has noticed, and the books about feeling left out are the ones for a child who has been on the receiving end. Listening books build the same muscle from a different angle, and the social-emotional learning list sorts everything by skill. The everyday practice sits in how to teach a child empathy and the full guide to raising a kind, sharing friend.