Children's Books About Self-Esteem (Ages 3–8)

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Mine came out with it in the car, which is where the real things always arrive. "I'm the worst one in my class." Worst at what, I asked, expecting reading. He couldn't narrow it down. Just the worst one, generally, as a fact about himself. I went looking for books about self-esteem that night and found a shelf full of titles that all sounded interchangeable, and they are not. Half of them are about a child who does not like who they are. The other half are about a child who does not think they can do anything. Buy from the wrong half and the book lands with a soft thud and nothing happens.

The one thing worth knowing before you buy

Psychologists split these two things apart, and it helps to borrow the split. Self-esteem is how a child rates themselves as a person. The other thing, the one that sounds like confidence, is closer to what Albert Bandura called self-efficacy in Psychological Review back in 1977: the belief that you can handle this specific task in front of you. They are not the same, and they come apart constantly. A child can be entirely comfortable with who she is and still convinced she will never climb that tree.

The second thing worth knowing is that the obvious fix, telling your child they are wonderful, is the one that research keeps poking holes in. Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck ran six studies, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1998, comparing children praised for being clever with children praised for working hard. The clever-praised group came off worse. After a setback they gave up sooner, enjoyed the work less, decided the problem was their own ability, and did worse on the next task. Their subjects were fifth graders, ten and eleven years old, so it is a signpost rather than a law for a four-year-old. But the direction matches what most of us notice at home: a label is a heavy thing to hand a child, because they then have to keep it true.

Which is why the books below mostly work by showing rather than reassuring. The child in the story says the thing your child said, and the book does not rush in to contradict them.

1. I Like Myself! by Karen Beaumont

A small girl announces that she likes herself, and then spends the whole book refusing to be talked out of it. She likes herself with bed hair. She likes herself with her eyes crossed and her toes in the air. She imagines herself grown horns or a beak or purple polka-dotted lips and decides she would still be fine with it. David Catrow's illustrations are gleefully unhinged and are half the reason it works. Sandpiper paperback, September 2010, 32 pages. This is the most straightforward book here and the one I would give first to a three- or four-year-old, because it never explains itself, it just models a child being happy in her own skin at full volume. The rhyme carries it for younger children who would sit through nothing longer. View I Like Myself! on Amazon →

2. Stand Tall, Molly Lou Melon by Patty Lovell

Molly Lou is the shortest girl in first grade, has buck teeth, and a voice her own author compares to a bullfrog being squeezed. Her grandmother has told her what to do with all of it, and when she moves to a new school and a boy named Ronald Durkin starts on her, she does exactly that. Every supposed flaw turns out to be useful. G.P. Putnam's Sons, August 2001, 32 pages, grade level preschool to three, illustrated by David Catrow. This is the one for a child who is getting comments at school, because Molly Lou never changes a thing about herself and never needs rescuing by an adult either. She is not brave about her teeth. She just has teeth. View Stand Tall, Molly Lou Melon on Amazon →

3. Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes

Chrysanthemum loves her name right up until the first day of school, when Victoria points out that it is long enough to take up half the alphabet and that she is named after a flower. She wilts across several pages, which is the honest part, and it is the music teacher who quietly ends it by mentioning her own name. Grade level preschool to three. Reach for it if the wound is specific and social rather than general, and especially if your child is being got at for something they cannot change: their name, their glasses, their family. The recovery in it comes from an adult rather than from Chrysanthemum, which is truer to how five-year-olds actually get through this but does make it a gentler book than the two above. View Chrysanthemum on Amazon →

4. A Bad Case of Stripes by David Shannon

Camilla Cream loves lima beans and will not eat them, because none of her friends like lima beans. She worries so hard about fitting in that she breaks out in stripes, and then in whatever pattern the last person to speak suggested, until she is a walking display of other people's opinions. Scholastic Bookshelf paperback, May 2004, 32 pages, grade level kindergarten to three. This is the people-pleaser's book, and it is the one on this list children remember for years, partly because the pictures are faintly alarming. Worth knowing before you buy: Camilla's transformations are genuinely strange looking, and a sensitive four-year-old may find that part more vivid than the point. View A Bad Case of Stripes on Amazon →

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

Here the list turns a corner. Lou is brave and inventive and afraid of nothing, apart from climbing a tree, which she cannot do. So she invents reasons. Her arm is hurt. She has to stay and mind the bags. She would rather do it tomorrow. Anyone who has watched a child construct an elaborate excuse rather than try something will recognise every page. Kids Can Press, May 2017, 32 pages, grade level preschool to two. It is the best book here for the child who says they are no good at things, because it names the avoidance out loud instead of treating the problem as feelings, and it ends on a "yet" rather than on Lou succeeding. View The Thing Lou Couldn't Do on Amazon →

6. Focused Silver by Neil Russell

Our own, and it is on this list for one half of the problem rather than the whole of it. Focused Silver is a book about focus, and it opens with a pup who has already decided he will never get there. Silver wants to be a superhero, cannot see how, and whispers it to himself. Later, asked to draw, he leaves the page blank, and when his friend Marianna asks why, he says he does not want to because it will look wrong and people will see it. Then, told to write a difficult word, he says "I can't do it" under his breath and sits hoping nobody notices. Those are the exact sentences a self-doubting child produces, and the book treats them as an ordinary starting point rather than a crisis.

What Marianna hands him is practical. The word "yet", stuck on the end of "I can't", which Silver tries out on skateboarding and reports back that it makes him want to have a go. Then the instruction not to measure himself against the other children at all, but against who he was yesterday. Then, the part most books skip, permission to ask for help out loud, because nobody can tell you are stuck unless you say so. By the end of the story he is taking on hard things on purpose, because he has worked out that the hard ones are what made him stronger.

“Instead of saying 'I can't', add the magical word 'yet'.”

Focused Silver: a superhero training story about focus, effort and the word yet, for ages 3–7. On this list for the I'm-no-good-at-anything half of self-esteem. If the trouble is that your child does not like who they are, buy one of the first four instead.

View Focused Silver on Amazon

The honest limit is that it has nothing to say about the other half. Nobody in it is teased, nobody dislikes how they look, nobody is the odd one out. If your child's sentence is about who they are rather than what they can do, this is the wrong purchase and one of the first four is the right one. There is a longer walk through the comparison scene in how Focused Silver teaches kids not to compare themselves to others, and the asking-out-loud part is in how Focused Silver teaches kids to ask for help. The lines themselves are collected on the Silver quotes about focus page.

7. Giraffes Can't Dance by Giles Andreae

Gerald the giraffe has bent knees and thin legs and is laughed off the floor at the Jungle Dance. A cricket finds him afterwards and tells him that sometimes when you are different you need a different song, and Gerald dances to the sounds of the grass and the moon instead. Orchard Books, September 2001, 32 pages, grade level preschool to three, illustrated by Guy Parker-Rees. One caution on the listing: the reading-age field reads one to three years, but Amazon marks that figure as coming from customers rather than the publisher, and it is well under what the book actually suits, so go by the grade level. It is last here not because it is weak but because it is the most lyrical and the least practical, and the message that you simply need your own music is a lovely idea a child cannot do much with on a Tuesday morning. View Giraffes Can't Dance on Amazon →

What to do after the book

The change that helped most in our house was giving up on contradiction. "I'm the worst one in my class" used to get "no you're not, you're brilliant," which he heard as evidence that I was not paying attention. Agreeing with the small true part works better. You found that page hard. You couldn't do it on Monday either, and you can now. It is a smaller claim and he can check it, which is the entire reason it lands.

The other thing was watching what I praised. Clever, talented, brilliant, natural, all the words that sound like gifts, are the ones that turn into a standard a child has to defend. Naming the actual thing they did instead costs nothing and cannot be lost. You went back and fixed the wobbly bit. You asked for help instead of giving up. That one, it turns out, is more or less the whole plot of the sixth book on this list.

How to choose between them

Work out which sentence you are hearing. "There's something wrong with me" is I Like Myself! "They keep saying things about me" is Stand Tall, Molly Lou Melon, or Chrysanthemum if it is about something they cannot change. "I have to like what they like" is A Bad Case of Stripes. "I'm no good at anything" is The Thing Lou Couldn't Do, and Focused Silver if you want the tools spelled out rather than shown. And "I'm just different from everyone" is Giraffes Can't Dance.

For the shelves either side of this one, best growth mindset books for kids is the closest neighbour and goes deeper on the word yet, best books about making mistakes is for the child who falls apart when something goes wrong, and best books about resilience covers getting back up afterwards. If the knock is coming from other children, best anti-bullying books and best books about feeling left out are the better fit, and children's books about the brain explains to a child why practice changes anything at all. If the sentence you are hearing is about being the odd one out rather than about being no good, children's books about being different is the right shelf. The full focus and learning guide ties the lot together.