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Short answer: start with The Color Monster if your child cannot yet name what is happening to them, In My Heart if they can name it but not feel where it sits, and Ruby Finds a Worry if the feeling has no name at all. Then The Way I Feel, My Many Colored Days, Tough Guys Have Feelings Too and Listening to My Body.
Ours came out as "I don't LIKE this day." He was four, something at preschool had gone wrong, and the whole thing arrived as one solid lump with no handles on it. I could see there were about three feelings in there. He had one word for all of them, and it was the wrong word.
Work out which of the three jobs you need the book to do
Nearly every list of feelings books is one long pile, which is why parents buy the wrong one. These books do three different jobs. Some name the feeling, breaking a mess into separate things with labels. Some make the feeling allowed, which matters enormously for a child who has worked out that certain feelings upset the adults. And some hand over something to do once the feeling has a name. A child who cannot name anything gets nothing from a breathing book, and a child who can name six feelings and still hurls the remote does not need a seventh word.
The list below runs in that order, and each entry says which job it does.
Why naming it does anything at all
Research suggests the naming part does real work. In Psychological Science in 2007, Matthew Lieberman and colleagues at UCLA scanned adults looking at upsetting photographs and found that putting a label on the emotion, compared with other ways of responding to the same image, quietened activity in the amygdala and raised it in part of the prefrontal cortex. Adults, in a scanner, looking at pictures. It is not a promise about your three-year-old on the kitchen floor, and anyone selling it to you as one is overreaching.
There is a thread with children in it too, and it is also worth holding loosely. Carroll Izard and colleagues, reporting in the same journal in 2001, tested how well 72 five-year-olds from economically disadvantaged families could recognise and label emotion expressions, then looked at the same children at nine. Emotion knowledge at five predicted their social behaviour and academic competence at nine, even after the researchers controlled for verbal ability and temperament. Seventy-two children in one specific group is a small study, and predicting is not causing. What both findings point at is modest and useful: feeling words earn their keep, so it is worth having more of them in the house than you strictly need.
1. The Color Monster: A Pop-Up Book of Feelings by Anna Llenas
This is the naming book, and it is the one I would buy first for almost any three- or four-year-old. The monster wakes up with all his feelings tangled together in a scribble of colours, and a small girl helps him put each one in its own jar: yellow for happy, blue for sad, red for angry, black for scared, green for calm. The pop-ups make the sorting physical, which is the whole point, and a child who has seen it will start telling you they feel a bit blue today. Union Square Kids, this pop-up edition 2015, 20 pages, publisher grade level preschool to grade 2. Two trade-offs worth knowing: pop-ups and small hands are a temporary arrangement, and there is also a flat picture-book version of the same story if your child is a tester of paper engineering. View The Color Monster on Amazon →
2. In My Heart: A Book of Feelings by Jo Witek
The naming book for the child who can already say "sad" but goes blank when you ask where they feel it. Every spread takes one feeling and describes it as a thing happening in the body: a heart that feels heavy, or fluttery, or ready to burst. Christine Roussey's illustrations pair with a heart-shaped die cut that shrinks page by page, and the sturdy board pages survive a two-year-old. Abrams Appleseed, 2014, 30 pages, publisher grade level preschool and up. It is genuinely lovely to read aloud, which matters at the fortieth reading. Bear in mind it stays gentle throughout, so it is a vocabulary book rather than one that handles a child in full flight. View In My Heart on Amazon →
3. The Way I Feel by Janan Cain
The plainest vocabulary book on the list, and the most used copy in a lot of preschool rooms. One feeling to a spread, each with a short rhyme and an enormous expressive face, and it goes well past happy and sad into frustrated, jealous, proud, thankful and bored. Janan Cain wrote and illustrated it. Parenting Press, 2000, 32 pages, publisher grade level preschool to grade 3. There is no story here at all, which is the criticism and also the feature: you can open it at the page you need, point, and ask if that is the one. Some children want a plot and will not sit through it. View The Way I Feel on Amazon →
4. My Many Colored Days by Dr. Seuss
For the youngest end, and for one specific idea the others skip: moods pass. Each day in it is a colour and an animal, so a red day is a horse kicking its heels and a grey day is a slow, quiet bird, and the book ends by returning the child to themselves. Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher painted it, and the paintings look nothing like standard Seuss, which is why it works as a bedtime book. Knopf Books for Young Readers, this edition 1996, 32 pages, publisher grade level preschool to grade 2. Best from around two and a half. The vocabulary is thinner than everything else here, so treat it as the opening move rather than the whole education. View My Many Colored Days on Amazon →
5. Tough Guys Have Feelings Too by Keith Negley
The permission book. Wrestlers, superheroes, knights, race-car drivers, a ninja, all drawn having a hard feeling, and almost no words, so it lands in about four minutes. Keith Negley's flat bold art is what carries it. Flying Eye Books, first published in 2015 and linked here in the 2024 jacketed hardcover, 32 pages, Amazon lists the reading age as 3 to 7 and the grade level as preschool to grade 2. I would buy this for a child who has already decided that being upset is embarrassing, which happens earlier than you expect, and often earlier in boys. The shortness cuts both ways: there is no method in it, just a door left open. View Tough Guys Have Feelings Too on Amazon →
6. Listening to My Body by Gabi Garcia
The first of the two do-something books, and the one that closes the loop between body and word. It walks a child through noticing what is actually happening physically, a tight chest, a hot face, a fizzing tummy, then pairing that sensation with the feeling it belongs to, with small practice activities along the way. Gabi Garcia is a licensed counsellor who spent years working in schools, and it reads like it, in the good sense. Illustrated by Ying Hui Tan. Skinned Knee Publishing, 2017, 34 pages, and Amazon's customer-voted reading age is 3 to 8. It is the most workbook-like title here and the least beautiful, so buy it for use rather than for the shelf, and it needs a child of four and a half or so to get anywhere. View Listening to My Body on Amazon →
7. Ruby Finds a Worry by Tom Percival
Last because it is the most specific, and first if it is the one you need. Ruby picks up a worry, drawn as a yellow scribble, and it grows every time she says nothing about it, until she meets a boy carrying one of his own and they talk, and hers shrinks. That is the whole lesson and it is the right one. Bloomsbury Children's Books, 2019, 32 pages, publisher grade level preschool and up, part of Tom Percival's Big Bright Feelings series. Buy it for the child who has gone quiet rather than loud, or who asks the same anxious question at bedtime every night. It is about one feeling only, so it is an addition to the shelf and not the foundation of it. View Ruby Finds a Worry on Amazon →
There is no Silver book about feelings, and it would be daft to dress one up as one. Sharing Silver has a single page on anger, where Angry Ann the ant snaps at the other ants over a game of chase and the whole anthill ends up shouting, and Silver's line about it is a good one: “anger is like mud on a trampoline. Jump on it, and the mud splashes right onto you.” That is one page in a book about giving. If anger in particular is your battle, our best books about anger for kids covers that shelf properly and explains where Sharing Silver honestly fits on it, and how Sharing Silver teaches managing anger unpacks that one page. For naming feelings in general, the seven above are the ones to buy.
What to do after the book
Three habits did more in our house than the reading did. Name your own feelings out loud in front of your child, including the unflattering ones, because "I am frustrated because we are late again" teaches the word in its natural habitat. Do the naming when everyone is calm rather than mid-storm, since a child in a big feeling has no spare room for vocabulary, and a book produced at the peak of it reads as a telling-off. And keep the book's own language alive afterwards: "was that a red page?" got further with us than any number of conversations about emotions, because it gave him a way to tell me without having to explain himself.
The thing to skip is quizzing. Turning every page into "and how do you think he feels?" empties a book fast. Read it as a story, leave the odd silence, and let them point.
How to choose between them
Buy by the job. A jumble with one word on it is The Color Monster. Knows the word, cannot locate it, is In My Heart. Needs more words than happy, sad and angry is The Way I Feel. Under three, and you want the idea that moods pass, is My Many Colored Days. Has decided that feelings are embarrassing is Tough Guys Have Feelings Too. Ready to do something with the feeling is Listening to My Body. Quietly worrying is Ruby Finds a Worry.
For the shelves either side of this one, best books about anger for kids takes the loudest feeling on its own, best books about self-control handles the pause between feeling and doing, children's books about self-esteem covers how a child feels about themselves rather than about a moment, children's books about worry is the shelf for the quiet end, and the social-emotional learning list is the wider shelf. Our guide to emotional regulation in preschoolers is the practical companion to all of it, and the full kindness and sharing guide ties the lot together.
If the child in question is three, four or five rather than anywhere up to eight, the companion list books about feelings for preschoolers runs easiest first, from sixteen board pages to forty-two, with none of the titles above repeated.