Best Growth Mindset Books for Preschoolers (Ages 3–5)

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Ours was four when he started saying "I'm not good at this" about things he had attempted roughly twice. A jigsaw. A buckle. Writing an A. It arrives earlier than you expect, and it does not sound like a crisis, which is the problem: it sounds like a small factual observation, and if you agree with it by rescuing him he files it as true.

So I went looking for books, and found that nearly every growth mindset list online is the same thirteen titles regardless of age. Several of them are lovely and useless at three. Bubble Gum Brain has a whole page of text per spread. My Strong Mind explains mental strength. Both are good books for a seven-year-old, and both will get you "can we read the dinosaur one instead" from a preschooler. What survives at this age is short, repeatable and preferably rhyming.

What the research says about what you say

One finding is worth knowing before you spend anything, because it changes your own words rather than your bookshelf. Psychologists distinguish between praising the child and praising what the child did: "you're so clever" against "you kept going when that was tricky". The second sort is called process praise.

In a study published in Child Development in 2013, Elizabeth Gunderson and colleagues, Carol Dweck among them, recorded 53 families going about their ordinary business at home while the children were between 14 and 38 months old, and counted the kinds of praise the parents used. Five years later they went back and asked the same children, then aged seven to eight, about effort and ability. The children who had heard a higher proportion of process praise as toddlers were more likely to believe ability can be improved, and more likely to want work that stretched them. The reverse did not show up, which is worth knowing: praising the child's qualities was not linked to fixed-ability beliefs later on. So read it as evidence for adding effort praise rather than for policing every "clever girl".

Hold it loosely. Fifty-three families is a small sample, and an association is not a cause. The practical version costs nothing and takes the same breath as the praise you were going to give anyway: say what they did, not what they are. Dweck is also the person behind the phrase that runs through half this list, the power of "yet", and "yet" is the bit of all this that a preschooler can genuinely hold on to.

1. The Magical Yet by Angela DiTerlizzi, illustrated by Lorena Alvarez Gómez

A girl comes off her new bike and decides she cannot ride it. From there the book runs through everything a child cannot do and reframes each one with a single word, and the Yet is drawn as a small glowing companion that follows the children about. It rhymes, the pictures carry most of the argument, and it takes about four minutes to read.

This is first because it is the only book here that leaves a preschooler holding something they can say. By the second reading mine were tacking "yet" onto the end of sentences as a joke, which is exactly how it is supposed to go in. 2020, 40 pages, publisher's age range 4 to 8, though it works at three with no trouble at all because the pictures do the lifting. The Magical Yet on Amazon.

2. Beautiful Oops! by Barney Saltzberg

A torn page becomes an alligator's jaws. A spill becomes a creature. A smudge turns into a rabbit. There is almost no text, and the book is built out of flaps, tears and die-cut holes, so the child opens each mistake and finds what it turned into.

I have it second for a specific child: the one who sees a wobbly line, scribbles the whole page out and asks for a new one. You can tell that child about effort until you are hoarse. What changes their mind is doing it with their hands twenty times in a row, which is what this book is. It is also the sturdiest thing on this list, which is a real consideration at three. Workman Publishing, 2010. Beautiful Oops! on Amazon.

3. Focused Silver: for the child who freezes before starting

Silver wants to be a superhero, so his friend Marianna teaches him one skill a day. Day three is called Mistakes Help Us Learn, and she finds him sitting in front of a blank sheet of paper refusing to draw in case it comes out wrong, so she scribbles a deliberately awful stick figure, one giant leg and two tiny arms, and holds it up: it looks funny, but I started. Day four is called The Power of Yet, and is Silver working out that he cannot skateboard yet.

“Instead of saying 'I can't', add the magical word 'yet'.”

Focused Silver: a story that teaches the superpower of focus, for ages 3–7. Written by us. Two of its four training days are growth mindset, which is why it is here and why it is not first.

View Focused Silver on Amazon

Here is where it fits. Half the book is growth mindset, which is more than most titles on general mindset lists can claim, and the mistakes day is the best scene in it: a grown-up drawing badly on purpose is the single most useful thing I have taken from any of these books, and it costs you nothing to copy tonight. What it is not is a book built for a three-year-old. The word on the cover is focus, it runs to twenty-four spreads, and it ends with a chase through a forest, so it lands better at five, six or seven than at the bottom of its band. If your child is three and the problem is purely giving up, the two books above this one do that job in a quarter of the words. If the freeze happens before they start, on drawing and jigsaws and getting dressed alike, this is the one that names it. You can read the opening pages free first.

4. Giraffes Can't Dance by Giles Andreae, illustrated by Guy Parker-Rees

Gerald the giraffe has knees that buckle and legs that are too thin, and at the Jungle Dance the other animals laugh at him. A cricket tells him that sometimes you need a different sort of music, Gerald listens to the swaying grass, and dances.

It is the oldest book on this list and still the most requested at bedtime, and the rhythm is why: it is written to be read aloud badly and still work. One honest caveat, because it changes what you say afterwards. Gerald does not practise. He finds his own music, so the lesson is closer to self-belief than to effort. Use it for the child who has stopped trying because somebody else in the room is better at it, and pair it with one of the two books above if what you need is persistence. First published in 1999, 32 pages. Giraffes Can't Dance on Amazon.

5. The Thing Lou Couldn't Do by Ashley Spires

Lou and her friends are brave adventurers who run faster than aeroplanes. Then the game needs a pirate ship, the ship is a tree, and Lou has never climbed a tree. What follows is a catalogue of excuses any parent will recognise instantly: she would rather play something else, her arm hurts, she is not dressed for climbing, she will do it tomorrow.

It is here for the ending, which is braver than the rest of the genre. Lou tries, she does not manage it, and the book stops there with her deciding to have another go. No triumph, no applause. Every other book on this list resolves; this one leaves the child in the middle of the difficulty, which is where they actually live. Buy it for the excuse-maker. Kids Can Press, 2017. The Thing Lou Couldn't Do on Amazon.

6. Your Fantastic Elastic Brain by JoAnn Deak

The one explainer on the list. It walks a child round their own brain, names a few of the parts, and makes the case that the brain stretches when you do something hard, and that mistakes are part of the stretching.

Last, not because it is weak but because it is the wordiest here and the only one that asks a child to follow an explanation. At three you will lose them. At five, especially with the child who answers "but why?" to everything, it is the book that turns "not yet" into something mechanical rather than a thing grown-ups say. Keep it on the shelf and bring it out when they ask. Your Fantastic Elastic Brain on Amazon.

How to pick one

Start from what your child says when it goes wrong. "I can't do it" is The Magical Yet. "I've ruined it" is Beautiful Oops!. "She's better than me" is Giraffes Can't Dance. "I'll do it tomorrow" is The Thing Lou Couldn't Do. Nothing at all, just a child sitting very still in front of the page, is the middle of Focused Silver. "But why does practising work?" is Your Fantastic Elastic Brain.

One thing to keep in proportion. The evidence for mindset work is more modest than the popular version suggests: a pair of meta-analyses published in Psychological Science in 2018 by Victoria Sisk and colleagues found that mindset interventions had weak effects on academic achievement overall, with somewhat stronger effects for students who were academically at risk or from low-income families. That is a reason to keep your expectations sensible, not a reason to skip it. A picture book is not an intervention, it is a shared phrase, and the phrase is free.

Then do the part no book can do for you. Fail at something in front of them this week, out loud and cheerfully, and narrate the second attempt. Every title here has an adult or an animal in it that is allowed to be bad at something first, and that is the bit a preschooler copies. If your child is nearer six or seven, the full growth mindset list has the longer books that start working at that age.