As children’s book authors who are also parents, we have read perhaps every children’s book under the sun about mindfulness and breathing. A while back, our six-year-old announced: “No more books about breathing. Breathing is BORING!” Shortly after that he was sitting at the dining room table with his crayons and asked us how to spell “breathing.” Cleaning up later we discovered he made a sign that said “B-R-E-A-T-H-I-N-G” in his crayon scrawl, inside a large red circle with a slash through it.
The moral of that story is that perhaps the best mindfulness lessons are, well, subtle. With that, we offer our list of breathing-free contemporary kids books that manage to include lessons about mindfulness without being explicitly about mindfulness.
1) The Silver Button by Bob GrahamBob Graham’s simple story recounts events happening simultaneously during a single minute in a child’s life. At 9:59 a.m., a silver button is placed on a doll’s boot, a baby is born, a jogger puffs by, and more. Both of our kids adore the cartoony illustrations and visual repetition in the detailed images as they zoom out from a single bedroom to a neighborhood to a cityscape to…
