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Short answer: for ages 3 to 7, start with Sharing Silver, because it shows a child the behaviour that makes other children want to be near them. Then Frog and Toad Are Friends, Strictly No Elephants, Enemy Pie, The Invisible Boy and Stick and Stone.
1. Sharing Silver — best for showing a child why other children come to them
Most friendship books for this age start after the friendship exists. Two characters are already friends, they have a wobble, they make up, everybody hugs. Which is lovely, and no use at all to the child standing at the edge of the yard wondering how the others got started. Sharing Silver goes further back than that. Silver the Super Pup meets Bandit, a dog who takes from everyone and gives nothing, and instead of telling him he'll never have friends, walks him round Friendship Forest to watch how it actually works: Olivia's music, Benny's waterwheel, a whole forest that looks after whoever looks after it.
What that gives a three- to seven-year-old is a mechanism rather than a mood. Friendship stops being something that happens to lucky children and becomes something you can start on purpose tomorrow, by being the one who shares first. Bandit is never shamed into it either. He watches, works it out, and chooses it, and children who have been told to "be a good friend" a hundred times take that far better than another instruction. The line our own two repeat back is the one about the kindest animals having the most friends, and it is short enough that a four-year-old owns it after a week.
“The kindest animals have the most friends, and those who help the most have helpers everywhere.”
Sharing Silver is a superhero training story about sharing, kindness and giving, written for ages 3 to 7. The one on this list that shows a child how a friendship gets started in the first place.
View Sharing Silver on AmazonYou can read a sample of Sharing Silver first to see whether the voice suits your child. If the sticking point is specifically the toys rather than the friendship, our best books about sharing and kindness list is the better shelf to raid.
2. Frog and Toad Are Friends — by Arnold Lobel
Five short stories, one grumpy friend and one patient one, and not a single lesson announced anywhere. Toad will not get out of bed, so Frog tears the pages off the calendar. Toad loses a button and everybody hunts for it. Nothing dramatic happens, and that is precisely the value of it: this is what a friendship looks like on an ordinary Tuesday, which no other book here shows. It is an early reader rather than a picture book, so it runs longer and works beautifully as two or three bedtimes in a row, and a five- or six-year-old who is starting to read will eventually take it off you and do it themselves. It earned a Caldecott Honor, and fifty years on it still reads as if it were written last year. View Frog and Toad Are Friends on Amazon →
3. Strictly No Elephants — by Lisa Mantchev
A boy with a tiny pet elephant is turned away from the Pet Club, meets a girl with a skunk who has been turned away too, and the pair of them go off and start a club where nobody is turned away from anything. Read this one when your child is the one being left out, because it does something most books on the subject refuse to do: it does not make the excluded child win the approval of the group in the end. They build something better instead. Taeeun Yoo's illustrations are soft and muted, and the whole thing turns on one small act: the boy notices the girl sitting outside on her own and says hello first, which is the exact move most children need shown to them. View Strictly No Elephants on Amazon →
4. Enemy Pie — by Derek Munson
Jeremy Ross has moved in down the road and ruined the summer, so Dad agrees to bake the legendary enemy pie, on one condition: to make it work, you have to spend a whole day being nice to your enemy first. You can see where it goes and your child cannot, which is most of the fun. It is the best book here for a child who has decided somebody at school is a lost cause, because it never asks them to like Jeremy. It asks them to spend one day with him, which is a far smaller thing to agree to and works far more often. Reading Rainbow picked it up years ago and it has stayed in circulation ever since. View Enemy Pie on Amazon →
5. The Invisible Boy — by Trudy Ludwig
Brian is not bullied. Nobody is unkind to him at all, which is the whole point. He is simply never picked, never invited, never noticed, and Patrice Barton draws him in grey pencil while the rest of the class is in colour. When a new boy arrives and Brian does one small thing for him, the colour starts arriving. Read this one if your child is more likely to be the overlooker than the overlooked, because it makes the invisible child visible in a way no talking-to ever manages. Best from about five, when children can hold the idea that you can hurt somebody by doing nothing. View The Invisible Boy on Amazon →
6. Stick and Stone — by Beth Ferry
Stick and Stone are both on their own until Pinecone starts on Stone, Stick steps in, and a friendship is made in about four words. Later a storm takes Stick away and Stone has to go and find him. It rhymes, it is very short, and it is the one on this list a three-year-old can follow the whole way through, so it is a good place to begin if the longer stories are still losing them halfway. Underneath the simplicity it teaches the hardest part of friendship: speaking up for someone while it is happening, not afterwards. View Stick and Stone on Amazon →
How to choose one, and how to read it
Buy for the week you are having, not for the reviews. A child who has nobody to play with needs Sharing Silver. A child who has been shut out needs Strictly No Elephants. A child who has written somebody off needs Enemy Pie. A child who never notices the quiet one needs The Invisible Boy. A child who watched a friend get picked on and said nothing needs Stick and Stone. And a child who has a friend already and keeps falling out with them needs Frog and Toad, because it shows two people who are simply not the same and stay friends anyway.
Then do the part that is free. Research on prosocial development suggests children take up social behaviour largely by seeing it modelled and then having it recognised in themselves, so the reading matters most when you name the real version out loud a day or two later. "You saw he had nobody to sit with and you moved over." Friendship is also more practice than theory: a single friend round for an hour will teach your child more than another six books, so use the story to give them the words and a playdate to give them the reps. If you want help with that part, our playdate ideas for kids and the guide on what to do when your child has no friends pick up where the books stop.
To narrow it by age, we have separate lists for toddlers, preschoolers and kindergarten, plus books about making friends if the sticking point is starting the friendship rather than keeping it. The full picture is in our guide to raising a kind, sharing friend.