Children's Books About Courage (Ages 3–8)

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We spent most of one August at the pool with a child who wanted to jump in and would not jump in. He would climb out, walk round, get back to the edge, and find a reason. His goggles. A verruca. The other children. I made every mistake available to me that fortnight, starting with telling him there was nothing to be scared of, which he correctly heard as me not understanding the situation at all.

The books helped more than I did, but only once I stopped buying the wrong ones. "Books about being brave" is a shelf with at least four quite different problems on it, and a book aimed at one of them bounces harmlessly off the others.

The one thing worth getting right first

Do not define courage as not being scared. It is the definition most of us reach for and it quietly closes the door, because a child who believes brave people feel calm will take their own thumping heart as proof that they are not one of them. The better line is the duller one: brave is what you do while you are still frightened. Every book below shows a child who is visibly afraid on the last page as well as the first.

The second thing is less comfortable. Research on childhood fear keeps landing on what the adults are doing around it. Eli Lebowitz and colleagues at the Yale Child Study Center built a treatment called SPACE that works only with parents: they cut back the accommodations they have been making around the child's fear while responding more supportively to the child. In a randomized trial published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in March 2020, it did about as well as treating the child directly with cognitive behavioural therapy. Those children had diagnosed anxiety disorders, so it does not translate straight across to a four-year-old dithering at the top of a slide. But the mechanism is one most of us recognise from our own kitchens. Answering for them in shops. Carrying them past the dog. Quietly cancelling the party. Every one of those teaches the fear that it works.

Which is roughly what the books do instead. Nobody in them is talked out of being scared, and nobody is rescued from the thing either.

1. Jabari Jumps by Gaia Cornwall

Jabari has finished his swimming lessons, he is jumping off the diving board today, and he has told everyone so. Then comes the ladder. He lets someone go ahead of him. He remembers some stretches he ought to do first. He decides tomorrow might be a better day for it. His dad, sitting with the baby, never once says there is nothing to be scared of. He says that sometimes it helps to take a deep breath and tell yourself you are ready, and then he leaves him to it. Candlewick Press, May 2017, 32 pages, and Gaia Cornwall's first picture book. This is the one I would buy first for almost any child, because the whole book lives in the gap between deciding and doing, which is where children actually get stuck, and because the adult in it does the hardest thing an adult can do, which is wait. View Jabari Jumps on Amazon →

2. Mikey and the Dragons by Jocko Willink

Mikey is frightened of a great many things, and the book turns them into dragons he keeps meeting. His grandfather hands him a sword, and it turns out the sword is not really the point: what shrinks the dragons is walking towards them instead of away. Illustrated by Jon Bozak, and the Amazon listing puts the reading age at three to seven. Buy this one when the fear has no single address. Not the diving board, but the dark, the hallway, next week, the noise the boiler makes. It is also the book on this list for a child who has worked out that other children do not seem to be scared of these things, because Mikey is plainly the most frightened person in his own story and the book treats that as the starting point rather than a flaw. View Mikey and the Dragons on Amazon →

3. After the Fall (How Humpty Dumpty Got Back Up Again) by Dan Santat

This picks up where the nursery rhyme stops. Humpty has been put back together, mostly, and he is now afraid of heights. He still loves birds and he can no longer get up to see them, so he lives on the bottom shelves of his own life, and the book is quite honest about how small that makes everything. Roaring Brook Press, 2017. The ending does something no other book here does, and I will not spoil it. Reach for this one when your child was brave before and something went wrong, because it is the only book on this list that starts after the fall rather than before it, and a child who has actually been hurt does not want to read about a child who has not. View After the Fall on Amazon →

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

Lou is brave and inventive and afraid of nothing, except climbing a tree, which she cannot do. So she invents reasons not to. Her arm hurts. Someone has to mind the bags. Tomorrow would be better. Kids Can Press, May 2017, 32 pages. Anyone who has watched a child build an elaborate case rather than attempt something will recognise every page, and my pool fortnight is in there almost verbatim. It belongs here rather than on a confidence list because Lou is not short of self-belief in general, she is short of it for one specific thing, and the book ends on a "yet" rather than on Lou reaching the top. View The Thing Lou Couldn't Do on Amazon →

5. Focused Silver by Neil Russell

Ours, and it is here for the second half of courage rather than the first. Focused Silver is a book about focus: a pup called Silver is trained by his friend Marianna to decide where his attention goes, to take one step at a time, and to add the word "yet" to the end of "I can't". Then, late in the story, he has to use all of it somewhere he did not plan to be. He is alone, it is dark and unfamiliar, and he tells himself it is too far and he does not know if he can make it. He gets hurt. He thinks about turning round and going home.

What he does instead is the useful part for a frightened child: one step, then the next, without deciding the whole thing is possible first. Marianna's line about mistakes comes back to him at the point where most children would quit. If your child's problem is that things start fine and fall apart once they turn out to be harder than expected, this is the half of bravery nobody puts in a book, and it is the half you get here.

“It's okay not to know, but it's not okay not to try.”

Focused Silver: a superhero training story about focus, effort and carrying on, for ages 3–7. On this list for keeping going once something is already hard and frightening. If your child cannot make themselves begin at all, buy one of the first three instead.

View Focused Silver on Amazon

The honest limit: it is not a book about fear. Nobody is frightened of the dark in it, nobody is being teased into doing something, and the standing-at-the-bottom-of-the-ladder moment is not really in there. It sits fifth for that reason. If you want the pieces on their own, there is how Focused Silver teaches taking the first step and how Focused Silver turns mistakes into fuel, and the lines are collected on the Silver quotes about focus page.

6. Stick and Stone by Beth Ferry

A stick and a stone, both alone, until a pinecone starts on Stone and Stick says something. Later the wind takes Stick into a puddle and Stone goes in after him. Illustrated by Tom Lichtenheld, and the text is almost nothing, which is the trick of it. This is the only kind of brave the first five books leave out: the sort you need when nothing is happening to you at all and something is happening to somebody else. Buy it if your child has come home describing a child who gets picked on, because speaking up for someone is harder than it sounds at four and this book makes it look like an obvious thing a friend does. View Stick and Stone on Amazon →

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

A child is followed around by a problem drawn as a grey swirling cloud, and the harder they avoid it the larger it gets, until they finally turn and face it and find something inside it. Illustrated by Mae Besom, and a New York Times bestseller. It is last not because it is weak but because it is the most abstract book on this list, and abstraction is the one thing a frightened four-year-old cannot use. Where it is genuinely the right purchase is for an older child, six or seven, who is avoiding something they cannot name: the test, the move, the thing on Thursday. The cloud getting bigger the longer it is ignored is exactly what avoidance does, and children get it immediately. View What Do You Do With a Problem? on Amazon →

What to do after the book

Two things changed our fortnight at the pool, and neither was a pep talk. The first was cutting the step down until it was almost insulting. Not jumping in. Sitting on the edge with both feet in the water. Then sitting on the edge while I counted. The step has to be small enough that the child is nearly certain they will manage it, because what you are after is not the jump, it is the evidence.

The second was to stop rescuing. I had got into the habit of noticing the wobble and producing an exit before he had to ask for one. Maybe tomorrow. Let's get chips. It felt like kindness and it was doing the thing the Yale work describes: quietly confirming that the fear was right about the danger. Saying nothing, staying near, and letting him take longer than was comfortable for me turned out to be the harder and better job. He jumped in on a Thursday, badly, and then would not get out of the pool.

How to choose between them

Listen for which sentence you are getting. "I want to but I can't make myself" is Jabari Jumps. "I'm scared" with no end to the list is Mikey and the Dragons. "I tried that and it was horrible" is After the Fall. "I'd rather not, my leg hurts, maybe later" is The Thing Lou Couldn't Do. "It's too hard, I'm stopping" once they are already halfway is Focused Silver. "They were being horrible to him and I didn't say anything" is Stick and Stone. And a worry with no shape to it is What Do You Do With a Problem?

For the shelves either side of this one, best books about making mistakes is for the child who falls apart when something goes wrong rather than before it starts, best books about resilience covers getting back up, and best books about perseverance is for the long middle of something hard. If the real trouble is that your child has decided in advance they are no good, children's books about self-esteem and best growth mindset books are the right shelf instead. When the fear is other children, try best anti-bullying books and children's books about being different. The full focus and learning guide ties the lot together.