Reading list
The Best Mindfulness Books for Kids
A hand-curated, honest list of four children's mindfulness books — from a first book about breathing for a three-year-old to the genre-defining practice book parents actually use. With age guidance, content notes, and editor's reviews.
There are two kinds of children’s mindfulness book, and only one of them works. The first kind explains mindfulness — what the brain is doing, why we breathe, how feelings are like weather. It is well-meant and almost always inert, because a child does not become calm by being told what calm is. The second kind simply is mindful: it moves slowly, it pays close attention to one small thing, and it trusts the child to feel the difference. The four books here are the second kind.
The anchor is Sitting Still Like a Frog, the book that more or less defined the category — a Dutch educator’s set of short, secular practices, with an audio track, that over a million parents have actually used rather than bought and shelved. It is the one to own if you own only one. Around it sit three picture books that teach attention without ever using the word: Each Breath a Smile, Thich Nhat Hanh’s gentlest book, on noticing your own breathing; Zen Shorts, the Caldecott Honor book in which a panda tells three small stories about letting go; and The Three Questions, a Tolstoy parable retold so that a child discovers, rather than is told, that the most important moment is the one happening now.
They run from three years old to twelve, and you buy them in that order. Each Breath a Smile for the toddler who can’t yet sit still; Zen Shorts and The Three Questions for the four-to-eight-year-old who can follow a story to its quiet turn; and Sitting Still Like a Frog for the slightly older child who is ready for an actual practice — and for the parent who reads it alongside them, which, with mindfulness books, is rather the point.
- 1
Each Breath a Smile
A small, soft introduction to mindful breathing for very young children, written by Thich Nhat Hanh and adapted from a verse he often taught at his Plum Village retreats. The first Buddhist practice book most American children encounter.
- 2
Zen Shorts
A giant panda named Stillwater arrives in three siblings' garden and tells each of them a Zen story drawn from the Buddhist and Daoist tradition. Watercolour illustrations of unusual delicacy. Caldecott Honor.
- 3
The Three Questions
A young boy named Nikolai is trying to answer three questions — when is the right time to do things, who is the most important person, and what is the right thing to do. His friends each give him an answer. Then a wounded panda named Leo enters the story, and Nikolai discovers the answers by living them. Based on a Tolstoy parable, rendered with a Zen sensibility.
- 4
Sitting Still Like a Frog
The genre-defining children's mindfulness book, by a Dutch educator working in the secular-mindfulness lineage of Jon Kabat-Zinn. Over a million copies sold worldwide. The book parents actually use, not the book parents buy and shelve.
