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Short answer: for three to six, start with Elmer. For the simplest possible version, It's Okay to Be Different. For a child everyone has decided they already know, Red: A Crayon's Story. For walking into a room where nobody is like you, The Day You Begin. For a name, a language or a home that marks a child out, The Name Jar. And when your child is the one doing the sorting, The Sneetches.
Almost every list of books about being different treats it as one topic. It is really two, and they need different books. One child is on the receiving end and wants to disappear into the middle of the group. Another child is perfectly comfortable and has begun announcing who can play. Hand the second child a warm book about how special they are and nothing happens at all, because they already agree.
What actually helps before you buy anything
Two things are worth knowing. The first is that noticing difference starts young. Preschoolers sort people into groups and quietly prefer their own group long before they can explain a word of it, which is how a four-year-old produces a sentence at a birthday party that makes everyone stare. Most of the time it is a gap in what they know rather than something wrong with them, and it responds much better to information than to being told off.
The second is that stories have a measurable effect here, though a smaller one than publishers imply. Lindsey Cameron and Adam Rutland ran a six-week study with 67 non-disabled children aged five to ten, published in the Journal of Social Issues in 2006. The children were read stories about friendships between disabled and non-disabled children, and across those six weeks their attitudes towards disabled people grew more positive. Psychologists call this extended or vicarious contact: a friendship you witness in a story doing a little of the work a friendship in real life would do. Sixty-seven children is a small study and six weeks is not one bedtime, so read it as a nudge rather than a guarantee. The practical version is that a book you return to beats a book you read once.
1. Elmer by David McKee
Elmer is a patchwork elephant, bright squares of colour in a herd of elephant-grey, and he is the one who makes everybody laugh. One morning he decides he is tired of being the different one, slips off to find berries the colour of elephants, and paints himself with them. Nobody recognises him. Worse, nobody laughs any more, and the herd stands about being oddly serious until the rain arrives and washes him back to himself. HarperCollins, September 1989, 32 pages, and one of the most read-aloud picture books in print. This is the one I would put first for a three- to six-year-old, because it never once tells a child that being different is good. It just shows what the day is like when the different one goes missing, and small children take that in perfectly well on their own. View Elmer on Amazon →
2. It's Okay to Be Different by Todd Parr
A run of short, flat statements with Todd Parr's thick-outlined, primary-coloured pictures: it is okay to need help, to have wheels, to come from somewhere else, to have two of something or one of something or none. There is no plot and it does not want one. Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, May 2004, 32 pages. It is the youngest book here and the most useful for a two- or three-year-old, and it is also the one to reach for when the difference in question is in your own family and you want it named out loud as ordinary rather than turned into a story with a lesson. Older fives will find it thin. That is the trade. View It's Okay to Be Different on Amazon →
3. Red: A Crayon's Story by Michael Hall
A crayon in a red wrapper keeps drawing things blue. Everybody tries to help. His teacher gives him more practice, his mother sends him out with a yellow crayon to make orange, and the grandparents decide he needs to press harder, and all of them are certain the problem is effort. Then another crayon asks him, quite casually, to draw a blue ocean, and it turns out there was never anything to fix. Greenwillow Books, February 2015, 40 pages. This is the book for a child who has been given a label, whether that is the shy one or the sporty one or the difficult one, and is now stuck performing it. Fair warning for parents: the adults in this book are the problem, and the first read can smart a bit. View Red: A Crayon's Story on Amazon →
4. The Day You Begin by Jacqueline Woodson
Woodson writes about the exact moment: you walk into a room and nobody there is quite like you. A girl has no holiday to describe because she spent the summer minding her sister. A boy is laughed at for how he says the name of the place he came from. Nobody is rescued by a teacher. What breaks it open is a child telling their own story and another child leaning in because part of it is theirs too. Nancy Paulsen Books, August 2018, 32 pages, illustrated by Rafael López, listed for ages five to eight. It is the most beautiful book on this list and the one to buy for a six- or seven-year-old who has started noticing they do not match, especially at a new school. Younger children will enjoy the pictures and miss the point. View The Day You Begin on Amazon →
5. The Name Jar by Yangsook Choi
Unhei has just arrived from Korea, and on the school bus the other children make a joke of her name. So when she gets to the classroom she says she has not chosen a name yet, and the class fills a glass jar with suggestions: Daisy, Tamela, Miranda. A boy called Joey works out what is going on, finds out that her real name means grace, and quietly removes the jar. Dragonfly Books, October 2003, 40 pages, listed for ages five to nine. Buy it if the difference your child carries is a name, a language, a country or a lunchbox, because this is the rare book where the child keeps the thing rather than growing proud of it in the abstract. It is also the best book here for the classmate, because Joey does something specific and doable. View The Name Jar on Amazon →
6. The Sneetches and Other Stories by Dr. Seuss
The other side of the shelf, and the reason it is worth owning. The Star-Belly Sneetches have stars on their bellies and will not let the Plain-Belly Sneetches near their frankfurter roasts, until a salesman turns up with a machine that adds stars, and then a machine that removes them, and the whole beach runs through both until nobody can remember who was which and all the money is gone. Random House, first published in 1961, and 72 pages in the edition linked here, with three other stories alongside it. Read this one to the child who has started ranking people, not to the child being ranked. It is long for a bedtime and the rhyme needs a reader who will commit, and it is far and away the funniest thing here, which is exactly why the point survives being read twenty times. View The Sneetches and Other Stories on Amazon →
What to do after the book
The instinct is to reassure, and reassurance is the thing that lands worst. A child who says they hate being the only one in their class who brings that lunch, or has that name, or cannot do that thing, and is told it makes them special, hears an adult who has stopped listening. Agreeing with the hard part first costs nothing. Yes, it is annoying when they say that. Then get specific, because "I'm different" is unanswerable while "Rory keeps saying my lunch smells" is a problem with a size and a shape.
The other move that works is finding one place where your child is not the only one. A cousin, a club, a neighbour, a character in a book. It does not have to be at school, and it does not have to be a person. What it does is break the sentence "I'm the only one" without arguing against it, which is the whole trick.
And if you are here for the other reason, because your child has started drawing lines about who can play, the most effective thing is usually the least dramatic. Read them The Sneetches, let them laugh at it, and then use the word when it comes up: that is a star-belly rule. A child who has a joke to attach an idea to will pick it up faster than a child who is being corrected.
How to choose between them
Work out which of the two shelves you are on. If your child is on the receiving end and is three to six, Elmer. If they are two or three, or the difference is a family one you want treated as ordinary, It's Okay to Be Different. If they have been labelled and are stuck with it, Red: A Crayon's Story. If they are six or seven and walking into rooms where nobody matches, The Day You Begin. If it is their name, language or where home is, The Name Jar. And if your child is the one sorting everyone else, The Sneetches, which is a different job entirely.
There is no Silver book about being different. Sharing Silver is about giving and the golden rule, Focused Silver is about focus and effort, and Silver and the Forgetful Robot is about memory. Nobody in the three of them is the odd one out or shut out for how they look, so none of them belongs on this list and we have not put one there.
For the shelves either side of this one, children's books about self-esteem is the closest neighbour and is the right page if the trouble is how your child rates themselves rather than how they compare, best books about feeling left out covers being excluded from the group, and best anti-bullying books is the one if it has gone past comments. On the including side, best books about empathy for kids and children's books about kindness both help, and when your child has no friends is the guide for the loneliest version of this. The full kindness and sharing guide ties them together.