Best Books About Taking Turns for Kids (Ages 3–7)

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Most lists on this subject are sharing lists with a different title on the front. That matters more than it sounds, because the two skills come apart in practice. A three-year-old who will happily hand you half the raisins will still scream when the scooter goes to their cousin, and the reason is simple. Sharing divides something. Taking turns means giving up all of it and waiting, which asks for patience and a kind of trust that the world will bring it back.

Two bits of research shaped how I use these books. The first is the reason turn-taking is worth the trouble at all. The Center on the Developing Child at Harvard describes the back-and-forth between a young child and a responsive adult as serve and return, and treats it as one of the ways early brain architecture gets built. The child babbles or gestures, the adult answers, the child answers back. That pattern is turn-taking, in its earliest form. So when your child waits for their go on the slide, they are rehearsing the shape of every conversation and every friendship they will have later.

The second is more immediately useful on a wet Tuesday. Walter Mischel and Ebbe Ebbesen, publishing in 1970, put preschoolers in a room with a treat and told them they could have a better one if they held out. Children waited substantially longer when the treat was out of sight than when it sat there in front of them. You already know this from your own kitchen. If the tablet is face down in a drawer the wait is survivable, and if it is glowing on the table it is not. Put the disputed toy away during the wait instead of asking a four-year-old to stare at it and be good.

One caveat worth carrying, since the marshmallow study gets quoted as destiny. When Tyler Watts, Greg Duncan and Haonan Quan revisited it in 2018 with a larger and more varied sample, the link between waiting at four and doing well at fifteen turned out to be much weaker once family background and early ability were accounted for. Your child grabbing the scooter is not a prophecy. It is a skill that has not been practised yet.

"My child won't take turns" turns out to cover at least five different children, and the book that helps is different in each case.

At a glance: which turn your child can't do yet

One child hands things over quite happily and then falls apart during the wait. One will not hand anything over at all. One grabs before the other child has finished. One has to be first through every door, up every ladder, at the front of every queue. And one takes turns beautifully with toys and then talks over every adult in the room. Find the row that sounds like your house and read that one first.

1. Sharing Silver, for the child who will not hand it over

This is a superhero training story about sharing and giving. In Sharing Silver, children discover that what they give to the world always finds its way back to them. Read it with the child who will not hand anything over, since a turn asks them to believe it will come back. If the waiting is the trouble, pair it with the Mo Willems book further down the list.

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

Sharing Silver: a superhero training story about sharing and giving.

View Sharing Silver on Amazon

Read it before the playdate, not in the middle of the row.

2. Llama Llama Time to Share by Anna Dewdney

Nelly Gnu comes round to play, and Llama Llama is fine with sharing the blocks right up until Nelly picks up Fuzzy Llama and tears him. This is the truest playdate in children's publishing. The trouble does not start over the boring toys, it starts over the one that matters, and it starts about eleven minutes in. Mama Llama mends the toy and takes it out of the game, which is the parenting most of us actually do rather than the parenting books usually recommend. Rhyming, short, and best from about two to five. Published in 2012, sixth in the series. View Llama Llama Time to Share on Amazon.

3. Waiting Is Not Easy! by Mo Willems

Piggie has a surprise for Gerald. The surprise is not ready. Gerald has to wait, and spends the whole book groaning about it in enormous letters while the sky quietly darkens behind him, until the surprise turns out to be the stars coming out. No other book on this list takes the waiting seriously as its own subject, and the waiting is the part children find hardest. It is also very funny, which matters, because a child who has laughed at Gerald's groaning has a name for the feeling next time it happens to them. A Geisel Honor book in 2015, published in 2014, and an early reader as much as a read-aloud, so it doubles up nicely once they start decoding. View it on Amazon.

4. It's Mine! by Leo Lionni

Three frogs on an island in Rainbow Pond spend their days squabbling over the water, the land, the food and the air. A large toad tells them to stop. They ignore him, a storm floods the island, and the rock all three cling to turns out to be the toad. The reason it belongs here is that it is the only book on the list where the children are unpleasant for most of it, and a child who has been fighting all morning recognises themselves in Milton, Rupert and Lydia instantly. Lionni's torn-paper artwork is worth the price on its own. Published in 1986, and it works from about three, though the ending lands better at five or six. View it on Amazon.

5. Sharing a Shell by Julia Donaldson

A hermit crab finds a shiny new shell and does not want to share it with a blobby purple anemone or a bristleworm. They end up sharing it anyway, and each of them turns out to be good at something the others need. This is the one for the youngest end of the band, partly because Donaldson's rhythm carries a two-year-old through and partly because the lesson is cooperation rather than sacrifice. Nobody gives anything up for nothing. Illustrated by Lydia Monks, glitter and all, and it was the first book the two of them made together. View Sharing a Shell on Amazon.

6. Interrupting Chicken by David Ezra Stein

The little red chicken promises not to interrupt her bedtime story and then charges into every fairy tale to warn the main character before they make their mistake. It is a book about turns in conversation, which is the form of turn-taking parents complain about most and books cover least. If your child talks over people constantly, this is more useful than another book about toys, because it lets you name the thing without a lecture. It took a Caldecott Honor in 2011 and it is genuinely funny read aloud, particularly if you commit to the shouting. Best from about four. View Interrupting Chicken on Amazon.

7. That's (Not) Mine by Anna Kang

Two fuzzy creatures want the same chair. Each one insists it is theirs, neither one moves, and the argument goes round and round until they finally give up on the chair and go off to play together instead. What makes it useful is that neither character is the villain. In most turn-taking stories one child is being unreasonable and the other one is patiently in the right, which is not what a standoff in your living room looks like. Here both are equally dug in, which is the honest version, and a child watching it recognises both halves of themselves. Christopher Weyant's cartooning does a lot of the work. Best from about three to six, and short enough to reread on the spot. View That's (Not) Mine on Amazon.

8. The Squirrels Who Squabbled by Rachel Bright

Cyril has forgotten to gather anything for winter and Bruce has gathered rather too much, and the two of them spot the same last pine cone at the same moment. What follows is a chase over a waterfall and a very near miss, after which they work out that one cone between two squirrels is still one cone. This is the book for the grabber. Not the child who refuses to hand things over, but the one whose hand is already moving before anyone has finished speaking. Jim Field's illustrations are enormous and the rhyme gallops, so it reads aloud well to a group. Roughly three to seven. View The Squirrels Who Squabbled on Amazon.

9. Mine! by Jeff Mack

A blue mouse and an orange mouse fight over a rock. The entire text is the word "mine", printed in blue or orange so you know who is shouting, and the argument escalates and escalates until it stops being about the rock at all. Nearly wordless books get overlooked for this subject and they should not be, because a two-year-old in the middle of a turn-taking row has no spare capacity for plot. They can follow pictures. They cannot follow a paragraph. This one also hands you the story to narrate yourself, which means you can put your own child's name in it. Ages two to five. View it on Amazon.

10. Me First by Helen Lester

Pinkerton is a pig who has to be first at everything, first in the queue, first down the path, first to answer any question going. On a picnic he hears someone calling for a sandwich, sprints ahead of everyone to claim it, and finds a Sand Witch instead, who puts him to work. Queue-jumping is its own species of turn-taking problem and almost nothing covers it. If your child is fine handing over a toy but has to be first through every door, up every ladder and down every slide, this is the one that names it, and it does so by making the pig ridiculous rather than making him bad. Lynn Munsinger illustrates. Best around four to seven. View Me First on Amazon.

11. Share and Take Turns by Cheri J. Meiners

This one is not a story and does not pretend to be. It is a plain, warmly illustrated explainer that walks through what taking turns actually involves, in short sentences a preschooler can hold, with real children in the pictures and a set of games and discussion questions at the back for the adult. It is the first in the Learning to Get Along series from Free Spirit Publishing. Some children need a narrative and some children just want to be told the rules, and if yours keeps asking direct questions about how it works, hand them this rather than another allegory involving animals. Ages four to eight, and it is a fixture in preschool classrooms for good reason. View Share and Take Turns on Amazon.

12. How Do Dinosaurs Play with Their Friends? by Jane Yolen

Jane Yolen's dinosaurs spend the first half of every book in this series behaving appallingly and the second half putting it right, and this is the friendship one: grabbing the toys, refusing a turn, and then sharing, waiting and saying please. Mark Teague draws the dinosaurs at full domestic scale, wedged into ordinary living rooms, which is most of the joke. The reason it earns a place is the format. A child who bristles at being taught something will happily point at a Tyrannosaurus doing the wrong thing and tell you it is wrong, and that is the same lesson arriving through a side door. Rhyming, short, ages three to six. View it on Amazon.

13. My Mouth Is a Volcano! by Julia Cook

Louis interrupts everybody, because his own words rumble up inside him and erupt. Then it happens to him at school, he finds out what being interrupted feels like, and his mother teaches him to bite down gently on his words and breathe until it is his go. Interrupting Chicken at number five is the funnier book and this is the more practical one, so they work well as a pair. The volcano gives your child a picture for the feeling and the breathing gives them something to do with it, which is the bit most books about interrupting leave out. Illustrated by Carrie Hartman. Ages five to nine, and it lands best once school has started. View it on Amazon.

How to choose between them

Pick by what is actually going wrong. If playdates fall apart over one particular toy, it is Llama Llama Time to Share. If the waiting is the problem, it is Waiting Is Not Easy!. If they are two and still learning the words, start with Sharing a Shell, or Mine! if even that is too many words. And if the trouble is at the dinner table rather than the toy box, it is Interrupting Chicken for the laugh and My Mouth Is a Volcano! for the technique.

Three more cases the classics miss. If the row is a standoff where neither child will move, That's (Not) Mine is the only one that refuses to pick a villain. If your child grabs before anyone has finished speaking, that is The Squirrels Who Squabbled. If they hand things over happily but have to be first through every door, that is Me First, and it is a genuinely separate problem from sharing. And for the child who wants the rules stated rather than dramatised, Share and Take Turns does exactly that.

Then keep the turns short. The single most common mistake is making a toddler wait a length of time an adult would find reasonable, which is roughly ten times what a two-year-old can manage. Start under a minute, use a sand timer so the wait is something they can see rather than something they have to hold in their head, and put the disputed toy out of sight while they wait. And praise the waiting, not only the handover. Waiting is the harder half, and it is the half that usually goes unremarked.

Once the book is finished, turn-taking games for kids is the companion piece with the actual games, and what to do when your child won't share toys covers the flashpoint moments. For the wider shelf, best books about sharing for toddlers is the two to three version of this list and best books about sharing and kindness is the long one. If sharing worries you more than waiting, Sharing Silver is a short story about giving things away, though it has no turn-taking in it. If your child is still at the very start of it, how to teach a toddler to share is the place to begin.