Best Books About Giving and Generosity for Kids (Ages 3–7)

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Most parents come looking for these books at one of two moments. Either Christmas is coming and the wanting has started to drown out everything else, or something small and awkward has happened: a birthday party where your child would not hand over the party bag, a cousin who went home empty-handed. Either way the request underneath is the same. You want your child to give something up on purpose, without being made to, and to feel alright about it afterwards.

One piece of research made me more patient about this. Lara Aknin, Kiley Hamlin and Elizabeth Dunn, publishing in PLoS ONE in 2012, watched toddlers under the age of two hand out treats and rated how happy they looked. The children appeared happier giving treats away than receiving treats themselves, and happiest of all when the treat came out of their own small stash rather than the researcher's spare pile. Psychologists sometimes call that costly giving. It was one study with very young children, so hold it lightly, but the direction is worth knowing: the pleasure is already in there somewhere. Your job is not to install it. It is to help your child find it again at the exact moment their hand is closed around a biscuit.

Which is what a good story does. It slows that moment down, puts it in someone else's hands, and lets your child watch how it turns out without anything of theirs being at stake. The six below are picked for range. One shows giving coming back around, one is about the hesitation itself, one is about the chance that was missed, and two are the famous ones that are worth owning and worth arguing with.

1. Sharing Silver: the one that shows a child what giving sets off

Bandit is a young dog with a talent for trouble. He raids a beehive in the opening pages and gets stung for it, and Silver the Super Pup does not lecture him. He takes him around Friendship Forest and lets him watch. Olivia the owl gives her music away and the forest gives back. Benny builds a waterwheel that serves everybody. Greedy Gus sits on his pile of cookies with nobody to eat them with. My children worked out where that was going long before Bandit did, which is exactly the point.

“You get what you give — and the more you give, the more you get.”

Sharing Silver: a superhero training story about sharing and giving, for ages 3–7. Best pick for generosity because it gives a small child a reason to open their hand that they can see working, instead of an instruction to be generous.

View Sharing Silver on Amazon

The reason it leads this list is the mirror idea running through it: the world reflects back what you put into it. That is an old thought, and psychologists have a name for the grown-up version of it, the norm of reciprocity, but no five-year-old needs the term. What they need is to see it happen three times in one story to characters they like. Sharing Silver also never makes giving costless, which matters. Bandit genuinely has to hand things over, and the book lets that be difficult before it is rewarding. You can read a sample of Sharing Silver first, and how Sharing Silver teaches generosity walks through the lesson beat by beat if you want to talk about it afterwards.

2. Should I Share My Ice Cream? by Mo Willems

Gerald the elephant has an ice cream. He also has a best friend, Piggie, who is not there. The entire book is Gerald standing on the spot working out whether to go and find her, while the ice cream quietly melts. It is very funny and it is doing something none of the others do, which is to sit inside the hesitation rather than skipping past it to the good deed. Children recognise that stalling instantly, because it is what they do. This one is from 2011, part of the Elephant and Piggie series, and the short repeated lines make it one of the few titles here a five-year-old can read back to you. View Should I Share My Ice Cream? on Amazon →

3. Each Kindness by Jacqueline Woodson

Maya is new, and Chloe and her friends never let her in. Not cruelly, just steadily. Then Maya moves away, the teacher gives a lesson about how small kindnesses ripple outwards, and Chloe is left holding a chance she cannot take any more. There is no reconciliation at the end. That is deliberate, and it is why the book lands so hard with six and seven year olds who are old enough to feel a regret they cannot fix. Written by Jacqueline Woodson, illustrated by E. B. Lewis, published in 2012, and it took a 2013 Coretta Scott King Author Honor and the 2013 Jane Addams Children's Book Award for younger children. Read it yourself first and be ready for questions at bedtime. View Each Kindness on Amazon →

4. The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein

A tree gives a boy her apples, then her branches, then her trunk, and by the last page she is a stump and he is an old man sitting on her. People have been arguing about this one since 1964 and I am not going to settle it here. I keep it on the list because the argument is the value. Ask a six-year-old whether the tree was happy and you will get a real answer, then ask whether the boy ever gave her anything back. That conversation teaches more about the limits of giving than a book everybody agrees with. It is genuinely sad, though, and it is the one title here I would not hand to a three-year-old at bedtime. View The Giving Tree on Amazon →

5. The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister

The most beautiful fish in the sea has shimmering scales and no friends, and only becomes popular once he starts handing the scales out. First published in 1992, and every parent recognises the foil pages. It also draws real criticism, which you should know before it arrives on your shelf: plenty of teachers read it as a fish being pressured into buying friendship rather than giving freely. Pfister has said the story was only ever meant to show the joy of sharing. Both things can be true, and the book is more useful once you stop treating it as a moral and start treating it as a question. Ask your child whether the other fish were being fair. Best from about four. View The Rainbow Fish on Amazon →

6. Have You Filled a Bucket Today? by Carol McCloud

Everyone carries an invisible bucket, and what you do either fills someone's or empties it. Worth knowing before you buy: this is a concept book, not a story, so a child expecting a plot will drift. What it gives you is a phrase the whole family can use, and that turns out to be the useful part. Once the picture is in your child's head you can say "that filled her bucket" across the dinner table and be understood without a speech. A lot of schools already use it, so it may not be new to them. Best for three to five. View Have You Filled a Bucket Today? on Amazon →

Reading about giving at Christmas

December is the hardest month to teach this and the easiest month to try. Read one of these in the first half of the month, before the countdown starts and the wanting takes over completely. Sharing Silver works well here because its lesson is about what giving sets in motion rather than about presents, so it does not sound like a lecture attached to the tree. Each Kindness suits a six or seven year old who is old enough to think about the classmate nobody has invited to anything.

Then give them something real to do, because a story with no practice attached fades by New Year. The three that worked for us: let your child choose one toy of their own to pass on, not one you have chosen for them; let them buy a sibling's present with their own money and keep the change out of it; and let them hand the thing over themselves rather than putting their name on something you bought. All three are slower and messier than doing it yourself. That is the cost, and it is the whole lesson.

How to choose between them

Pick by where your child is actually stuck. If they cannot see why giving is worth it, start with Sharing Silver. If they want to give but freeze at the moment of handing over, it is Should I Share My Ice Cream? If they are old enough to have already left someone out, it is Each Kindness. If you want a phrase the family can use by the weekend, it is the bucket. And if you want an argument worth having at seven, it is The Giving Tree.

One last thing about the reading itself. Resist finishing with "so what should we always do?" The question flattens the story into a rule, and rules are the thing your child has already learned to nod at. Ask what they would have done instead. You will get a slower answer and a more honest one, and it is a better use of the ten minutes.

For more from the same shelf, best books about sharing and kindness is the wider list this one sits inside, and best books about helping others covers the doing rather than the giving. When you want things to try instead of things to read, ways to teach your child to share is the practical companion, and kindness activities for kids has the ideas we actually used.