Best Books About Kindness for Preschoolers (Ages 3–5)

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Preschool kindness books have a harder job than the ones written for school-age children, and most parents work this out the hard way, after buying something beautiful their four-year-old will not sit through. A three or four year old cannot hold a plot. What they can hold is one situation, one child, one choice, and a last page where it turns out well. Anything longer and you lose them in the middle.

That is the filter I used for this list. Every book here stays with a single moment, and every one of them resolves. There is no book on this page where somebody is unkind and never gets the chance to put it right, which is a deliberate choice. Those books exist and some of them are wonderful, but they belong a couple of years later, and I have put them on the kindergarten list instead.

One thing worth knowing before you start, because it changes what you expect from these books. Small children are more inclined towards kindness than they usually get credit for. A study by Lara Aknin, Kiley Hamlin and Elizabeth Dunn, published in PLOS ONE in 2012, gave toddlers under the age of two a pile of treats and found they appeared happier giving treats away than receiving them, and happier still when the treat they handed over was one of their own. That is a small study on very young children, so hold it lightly. It does suggest that when you read these books, you are not installing something new. You are giving your child words for something they already half feel, and the words are the part they are missing at three.

1. Sharing Silver: the one that shows a preschooler the pattern instead of explaining it

Bandit is a dog who is always up to something, and the story opens with him raiding a beehive and getting stung for his trouble. Silver the Super Pup does not lecture him. He walks him round Friendship Forest and lets him watch what happens. Angry Ann snaps at the other ants and the game falls apart. Greedy Gus clutches his bag of cookies and ends up with nothing while everybody else swaps. Olivia the owl gives her music away and the whole forest gives back. Each one is a short, self-contained scene, which is exactly how a three-year-old takes a story in, and it is why Sharing Silver holds up at this age when longer kindness books do not.

“If you smile, the world smiles back.”

Sharing Silver — a superhero training story about sharing and giving, for ages 3–7. Best pick for preschool because the lesson arrives as something your child can see happening rather than something they have to be told.

View Sharing Silver on Amazon

The reason it lands at three rather than six is that smiling is something a preschooler can actually do. Most kindness advice aimed at this age asks for things a three-year-old cannot reliably manage yet, like waiting, or giving up a toy they are still holding. Smiling first is within reach on a bad morning, and it works often enough that your child notices the result themselves. The other thing that helps: Bandit is never the villain. He is a dog who does unkind things and then learns something, so it reads gently if your own child has been the difficult one that week. You can read a sample of Sharing Silver before you buy, and there are more everyday ways to build the habit in how to teach kids kindness.

2. Be Kind by Pat Zietlow Miller

A girl spills grape juice on her dress in front of the class, and the narrator spends the rest of the book working out what being kind would actually look like. She thinks through the small options, the ones that feel too small to matter, and lands on doing one of them anyway. Preschoolers rarely ask what kindness means. They ask what they are supposed to do, and this is the clearest answer on the list. It skews a little older than three, so with a younger child, read it yourself first and pick out the two or three examples that match their week. View Be Kind on Amazon →

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

Everybody carries an invisible bucket. Kind words fill it, unkind ones dip into it, and dipping empties your own bucket too. The image is plain and it sticks, which is the whole point at this age. Plenty of preschools and primary schools use the language, so there is a fair chance your child comes home talking about filling and dipping before you have read it, and having the book at home makes the two line up. Best for the child who is kind without yet noticing they have any effect on anyone. View Have You Filled a Bucket Today? on Amazon →

4. The Rabbit Listened by Cori Doerrfeld

Taylor builds something wonderful and it gets knocked down. One animal after another arrives to tell Taylor what to do about it: shout, hide, laugh, get even. Then the rabbit turns up and just sits close. This is the book for the child who freezes when a friend or a sibling is crying, because it shows them that being there is a thing you can do, and that they do not need words they have not got yet. Gentle, almost wordless in places, and short enough for a three-year-old. It is also the one on this list our own children asked for most often. View The Rabbit Listened on Amazon →

5. Strictly No Elephants by Lisa Mantchev

A boy and his tiny pet elephant are turned away from the Pet Club, so they go and find another child who has been shut out and start a club where nobody is. Quiet, warm, and the best book here on being left out, which at three and four is what unkindness nearly always looks like. It works for the child who has been excluded and just as well for the one doing the excluding without really understanding that is what they are doing. View Strictly No Elephants on Amazon →

6. The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister

The most beautiful fish in the sea has shimmering scales and no friends, and gives his scales away one at a time until he does. Worth knowing that some adults find the message uncomfortable, since the fish is essentially buying friendship by giving away pieces of himself. Preschoolers do not read it that way at all. They take the plain version, which is that holding everything and sitting alone is worse than sharing, and the foil scales hold their attention long enough for it to land. Read it, decide for yourself, and talk about it if the ending nags at you. View The Rainbow Fish on Amazon →

7. Sharing a Shell by Julia Donaldson

A hermit crab finds a shiny new shell and wants nothing to do with the blobby anemone and the bristleworm who fancy moving in. By the end the three of them need each other. It rhymes, it is around twenty-four pages, and it is the easiest book on this page for a just-turned-three-year-old to sit through, so start here if your child is at the youngest end of preschool. The sparkly illustrations do a lot of the work of keeping them in the room. View Sharing a Shell on Amazon →

How to read these so they stick

Read it once for the story and do not stop to point out the lesson. Preschoolers shut down the second a book becomes a lecture, and it is obvious on their faces when it happens. On a later reading, pause where somebody could have been kind and ask what your child would have done. Take whatever answer you get, including the honest and unflattering ones, and leave it there.

Repetition is doing more work than variety at this age. Three books read thirty times will change more than thirty books read once, because your child needs to know a story well enough to predict it before they can borrow anything from it. Then the part that actually changes behaviour happens later, in an ordinary week, when you name it as it occurs. "You gave him a turn without being asked. That's the thing Silver does." That sentence is what turns a story your child heard into something your child does.

When your child is five or six, most of these get too easy and it is worth moving up to the kindergarten kindness list, where the stories run longer and the endings stop being tidy. If the sticking point is specifically toys and turns rather than kindness in general, the preschool sharing list is the more useful one. Got a younger one coming up behind? The toddler kindness list covers ages 1–3, where most of it is board books and pictures rather than plot. And we keep a wider selection across ages 3–7 at children's books about kindness.