Best Children's Books About Respect (Ages 3–7)

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One thing worth settling before the list. Respect and manners get sold as the same lesson and they are not. Manners are the words: please, thank you, waiting your turn to speak. Respect is what sits under them, which is treating a person as though they matter when nobody is checking. A child can have immaculate manners and still be the one giggling at the new girl's name. If it is genuinely the words you are after, our books about manners for kids covers that side. This page is about the people.

The books are ordered by which piece of respect each one teaches, not by age or by how the cover looks. Pick the one that matches what your child is currently getting wrong, and skip the rest until later.

1. Sharing Silver — best for the child who is only kind to the people who are kind first

Bandit takes from everybody in Friendship Forest and gives nothing back, and he genuinely cannot work out why nobody wants him around. What Sharing Silver does differently is refuse to tell him off. Silver the Super Pup walks him round the forest and shows him how the place actually runs: Olivia's music, Benny's waterwheel, everybody quietly looking after whoever looks after them. Bandit arrives at the rule himself, which is the only route by which a four-year-old ever really takes one on.

That rule is why this sits at number one. Every other book here teaches respect towards somebody who is already in front of your child. This is the one that argues for going first, before there is any evidence it will be returned, and for most children that is the hard part. It is also the closest thing on the list to the Golden Rule in a form a preschooler can hold, which is what the whole idea of respect reduces to at this age. Written for ages three to seven, and short enough to read twice in a sitting.

“How you treat others is how you will be treated by others.”

Sharing Silver is a superhero training story about sharing, kindness and giving, written for ages 3 to 7. The book on this list that teaches the rule the rest of them apply.

View Sharing Silver on Amazon

You can read a sample of Sharing Silver first to hear the voice. There is a reason this framing works on small children, incidentally: reciprocity, the pull to return what we have been given, is one of the older ideas in social psychology, and children pick it up long before they can explain it. Silver simply makes it visible.

2. Do Unto Otters: A Book About Manners — by Laurie Keller

Mr Rabbit finds out that otters are moving in next door and panics, because he has no idea how to get on with an otter. The owl's advice is the Golden Rule, and the rest of the book is Rabbit working through what that would actually require of him: be honest, be kind, share, say sorry, do not tease, do not interrupt. Keller's jokes fly fast and there are puns your child will not catch for two more years, which is what keeps it re-readable. It is filed under manners and it is really a respect book, because every rule in it is expressed as how the other creature would feel. Ages three to seven. View Do Unto Otters on Amazon →

3. Chrysanthemum — by Kevin Henkes

Chrysanthemum loves her name until her first day at school, when Victoria announces it is far too long and the giggling starts. Henkes is precise about how disrespect really works at this age: not one big act of cruelty but a drip, performed in front of children who say nothing. Read it for the classroom rather than for Victoria. Ask your child what any of the others could have done and you will get somewhere a lecture never gets you. Worth knowing that the rescue arrives from a teacher, not a classmate, and that gap is the whole conversation. Ages four to eight. View Chrysanthemum on Amazon →

4. The Rabbit Listened — by Cori Doerrfeld

Taylor builds something magnificent out of blocks and it collapses. The animals arrive one after another with advice: shout about it, laugh it off, go and knock something else down. Taylor wants none of it. Then the rabbit comes over, says nothing at all, and edges closer until Taylor is ready to talk. This is respect pointed at somebody's feelings rather than their belongings, and it is the piece adults get wrong at least as often as children do, because our instinct is to fix. Listed from age two, and it still lands at five or six. It doubles as comfort on a bad day. View The Rabbit Listened on Amazon →

5. Strictly No Elephants — by Lisa Mantchev

A boy with a tiny elephant for a pet turns up at the Pet Club and finds a sign on the door. He leaves, meets a girl with a skunk, and they go off and start a club with no sign at all. Taeeun Yoo's illustrations do most of the work here and the text stays out of the way, which is why it lands with three- and four-year-olds who are not ready for a discussion about inclusion. Respect for difference is an abstract phrase; a door somebody is not allowed through is not. Ages three to five. View Strictly No Elephants on Amazon →

6. My Mouth Is a Volcano! — by Julia Cook

Louis has so many important thoughts that they rumble up and erupt straight over whoever is speaking. Then it happens to him, and he does not enjoy it. This is the practical end of the list and the one to buy if the problem in your house is a child who cannot let anybody finish a sentence, because Cook gives them something to do about it rather than something to feel guilty about: bite the words down, breathe, wait. Letting someone finish is where respect starts for a lot of children. Ages four to seven, and it pairs well with our books about listening. View My Mouth Is a Volcano! on Amazon →

How to choose one, and what to do after you close it

Match the book to the gap. A child who only gives to the children who give back needs Silver. A child who needs the rule spelled out in plain language needs the otters. A child who joins in with the giggling, or who watches it and says nothing, needs Chrysanthemum. A child who charges in to fix a friend's bad mood needs the rabbit. A child who has decided somebody is too different to play with needs the elephant. And a child who talks over the whole table needs Louis.

Then do the part almost everybody skips. Do not ask whether your child would have been respectful, because they will say yes; that is the answer the question is fishing for. Ask what they would have said, out loud, in words, standing where that character was standing. You will get some strange answers and that is the point. A sentence rehearsed at bedtime is far likelier to turn up at lunchtime than an agreement about respect in the abstract.

One caution while you do it. Keep respect and obedience apart, out loud, because a child will not separate them unaided. Respect is how you speak to somebody and how you treat them. Obedience is doing what you are told. A child can be entirely respectful and still say no, still refuse a hug, still tell you that a grown-up made them uncomfortable. Most of us absorbed a version of respect that quietly welded the two together, and that weld is exactly what stops a child speaking up when speaking up matters.

Expect it to take a while. The visible half of respect shows up early: a two-year-old can be taught to wait while somebody else is talking. The rest leans on working out what another person feels when it differs from what you feel, and research suggests that builds gradually across the preschool and early school years. A four-year-old who laughs at somebody's name has usually not noticed the sting rather than decided to ignore it.

If your child is starting school this year, the kindergarten rung of this list narrows it to the five and six year old versions of the problem: the carpet, the line and the playground.

For more, see our guide to raising a kind, sharing friend, how to teach a child empathy for the skill sitting under every book on this page, and books about manners if it is the please and thank you you are chasing.