Best Picture Books About Problem Solving for Kids (Ages 3–7)

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These are books we have read at home, not a list scraped off other lists. I started collecting them the year my son decided that anything he could not do immediately was a thing he could not do at all. Shoes, jigsaws, the letter S. He was not lazy and he was not upset, exactly. He just looked at the task, decided it belonged to somebody bigger, and went and did something else.

The thing that shifted it was smaller than any pep talk. I stopped asking him to do the task and started asking him to do the first bit of the task. There is decent research behind that, if you want it. In 1981 Albert Bandura and Dale Schunk took a group of children who were behind at maths and, more to the point, wanted nothing to do with it, and set them working through the same material under different goals. One group got a near goal for each session, one got only the distant goal of finishing the whole set by the end, one got no goal at all. The children working toward the close-at-hand goals got further, ended up believing they were capable, and started choosing the sums voluntarily. The distant goal did roughly nothing. It is one study from 1981, so hold the detail loosely, but the shape of it matches what any parent sees on a kitchen floor: near goals move children, far ones do not.

So that is the filter for this list. Not books where a child is told to be brave, but books where a child does something specific: names the problem, shrinks it, tries the second idea, or discovers that the fourth attempt is where the thing actually starts working.

1. Focused Silver: the one that shrinks the mountain

Silver wants to be a superhero and cannot hold his attention still long enough to train. Marianna, who is calm in the way small children find fascinating rather than boring, gives him the line the whole book turns on: don't look at the mountain, look at the first step. Then a toy-stealing villain arrives to test whether he has actually learned it, which is the part children wait for.

“If you want to climb a mountain, don't focus on the whole mountain — just focus on the first step.”

Focused Silver: a superhero training story about focus, for ages 3–7. Best problem-solving pick because it teaches the move everything else rests on, which is cutting a job small enough that a child can start it.

View Focused Silver on Amazon

Most problem-solving books for this age are about attitude. This one is about method, and the method is the same one in the Bandura and Schunk study above, handed to a four-year-old as a picture of a dog and a hill. Focused Silver also carries the two lines that get quoted back at me most often in our house: failure is the fuel for success, and instead of saying I can't, add the magical word yet. That second one is why it sits beside The Magical Yet further down rather than competing with it. What I notice when we read it is that Silver is allowed to be genuinely rubbish at focusing for most of the book, which gives a struggling child somewhere to stand. You can read a sample of Focused Silver first, and how Focused Silver teaches one step at a time takes the same idea apart slowly.

2. What Do You Do With a Problem? by Kobi Yamada

A boy is followed around by a problem drawn as a swirling grey cloud, and the harder he ignores it the bigger it gets. That is the whole first half, and it is uncomfortably recognisable if your child is an avoider rather than a quitter. When he finally turns and looks at it, the problem opens up and there is an opportunity inside. Mae Besom's illustrations do the heavy lifting, moving from pencil grey into colour as he stops running. Read this one first if the trouble in your house is that hard things never get started. Best for four to eight. View What Do You Do With a Problem? on Amazon →

3. The Most Magnificent Thing by Ashley Spires

A girl has a perfect idea and a dog for an assistant, and sets out to build the thing. It comes out wrong. She builds it again. Wrong again. She keeps going until she is properly furious, hurts her hand, quits, and stomps off, and then her dog takes her for a walk and something loosens. She comes back, looks along the row of wrong things she made, and finds the bits of each one that were right. I have never read a better picture of the middle of a hard job, the bit where a child is not brave or determined but simply cross. Best for three to seven. View The Most Magnificent Thing on Amazon →

4. Rosie Revere, Engineer by Andrea Beaty

Rosie invents in secret because somebody once laughed at one of her creations, and a child who has been laughed at recognises that instantly. Her great-great-aunt Rose asks for a flying machine, Rosie builds a cheese-powered helicopter, it lifts off and then crashes in the yard. Rosie is mortified. Aunt Rose is delighted, because it flew, and the only true failure is quitting. David Roberts's drawings are stuffed with gadgets worth hunting through, and the rhyme carries even for the three-year-olds. Best for four to seven, and it goes well with books about perseverance for kids. View Rosie Revere, Engineer on Amazon →

5. Stuck by Oliver Jeffers

Floyd's kite gets caught in a tree, so he throws his shoe up to knock it down. The shoe gets stuck. He throws the other shoe. Then a cat, a ladder, a bucket of paint, an orangutan, a whale. It is the only book here about doing problem solving badly. Children find it enormously funny, which is exactly why it works. Ask one question when you close it: what could Floyd have done instead of throwing another thing? My daughter had an answer by the second reading, and she was four. Best for three to seven. View Stuck on Amazon →

6. The Magical Yet by Angela DiTerlizzi

This is the belief that has to sit underneath all the trying. A girl falls off her bike and decides she cannot ride it, and the Yet turns up as a small glowing companion to point out the word missing from the end of that sentence. Lorena Alvarez Gómez's artwork is gorgeous, and it is short enough to become a phrase you use rather than a book you read. Once it is in the house, I can't do it yet starts coming out of children unprompted. Best for four to eight, and it pairs with growth mindset books for kids. View The Magical Yet on Amazon →

How to choose between them

Pick by where your child actually stalls. If they look at the job and go blank, read Focused Silver, because it is about making the job smaller. If they will not start at all and change the subject when you bring it up, read What Do You Do With a Problem? If they start beautifully and explode at the fourth attempt, read The Most Magnificent Thing. If somebody laughed at something they made, read Rosie Revere. If they repeat the same failing idea louder and louder, read Stuck and laugh with them. And if the sentence you keep hearing is I can't, read The Magical Yet and let the missing word do the work.

Then use it the next day, out loud, on something real. That is the part that gets skipped. When the jigsaw goes wrong, say the line: what is the first step. When the tower falls over for the third time, say the other one: that one told us something. Keep your hands off it while they think, which is genuinely difficult, and let the small struggle happen. A child who has heard the words and then used them on a real annoying problem in their own kitchen has learned something. A child who has only had the book read to them has enjoyed a story.

Worth saying plainly: none of this is quick, and a book will not fix a child who is melting down every homework night. If that is where you are, helping your child concentrate on homework is the more useful page. For everything underneath problem solving, Help Your Child Focus & Learn is the full guide, and best books to help kids focus and concentration games for kids are where I would go next.