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.

The six below are picked for range rather than repetition: one about turns at a playdate, one about the waiting itself, one about refusing to take turns with anything at all, one about sharing a space, and one about turns in conversation, which is the version that shows up at your dinner table.

1. Sharing Silver: the one that gives a child a reason to hand it over

Bandit is a dog who is always in trouble, and the story opens with him raiding a beehive and getting stung for it. Silver the Super Pup does not tell him off. He walks him round Friendship Forest and lets him watch what happens to the animals who give and the animals who don't. Benny builds a waterwheel the whole forest uses. Olivia the owl gives her music away and the forest gives back. Greedy Gus sits alone on a pile of cookies. Every four-year-old already knows a Gus, which is why the point lands without anyone having to explain it.

“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 turn-taking because it answers the question a child is actually asking in that moment, which is not how do I take turns but why should I go first.

View Sharing Silver on Amazon

Handing the scooter over is a leap of faith for someone who has been alive for four years. They have no evidence yet that giving something up leads anywhere good. Sharing Silver supplies that evidence in story form, which is the only form a small child accepts, and it does it without an adult standing over the scene explaining the moral. Bandit works it out by watching, and your child works it out by watching Bandit. You can read a sample of Sharing Silver before buying, and how Sharing Silver teaches kids to share breaks the lesson down page by page if you want to know what you are getting.

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 Waiting Is Not Easy! 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's Mine! 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 →

How to choose between them

Pick by what is actually going wrong. If your child doesn't see why they should ever go first, it is Sharing Silver. 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. And if the trouble is at the dinner table rather than the toy box, it is Interrupting Chicken.

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 your child is still at the very start of it, how to teach a toddler to share is the place to begin.