Children's Story Books About Friendship (Ages 3–7)

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1. 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 →

2. 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 →

3. 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 →

4. Sharing Silver: for the link between sharing and friends

This is a sharing story, and friendship is a by-product of it rather than the plot. In Sharing Silver, Silver the Super Pup meets Bandit, a dog who steals honey and gets stung for it, and walks him round the forest to watch how giving comes back: Olivia's music, Benny's waterwheel, and Greedy Gus, who keeps his cookies to himself and ends up alone.

Friends come into it through a couple of Silver's lines, "If you are friendly, you will have friends" and "the kindest animals have the most friends," rather than through two characters making, keeping or repairing a friendship. So it won't do what the other books here do. What it gives a three- to seven-year-old is the connection between sharing and having people to play with, and Bandit is never shamed into it. He watches, works it out, and chooses it. The line our own two repeat back is the one about the kindest animals, 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. A sharing story with a friendship thread, rather than a friendship story.

View Sharing Silver on Amazon

You 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.

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 grabs and won't share, and can't see why the others drift off, 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.