A book can help with
For the child for whom five more minutes is an eternity.
Waiting is genuinely hard when you’re small. A week until the party feels like a year, five minutes until dinner is unbearable, and the seed planted yesterday has stubbornly failed to become a sunflower. Patience isn’t a virtue children arrive with; it’s something they slowly grow into.
Books help by making the waiting itself into a story with an end in sight, which is the very thing a child can’t yet imagine. The best of them show something genuinely worth waiting for, and quietly make the case that the anticipation is part of the pleasure.
Here’s what I’d reach for. Find your child’s age and start there.
Not yet
For the youngest, waiting has no shape at all. These give it one, gently.
Five toys sit on a windowsill, each waiting for something different: the moon, the rain, the wind. Almost nothing happens, and that’s the point, it makes waiting itself into something peaceful rather than agonising. A Caldecott Honor book, and unexpectedly soothing at bedtime.
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A boy plants a carrot seed and everyone tells him it won’t come up, and he waters it and waits, and waits, and it does. In very few words it makes the case for patience and quiet faith. A tiny, perfect classic that’s been reassuring children since the 1940s.
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Worth waiting for
Now they can hold a longer wait in mind. These show the reward at the end of it.
Ten seeds are planted and, one by one, most are lost to snails and mice and footballs, until a single sunflower grows and makes ten more seeds. It teaches waiting and the seasons together, and the counting keeps a young child engaged. Simple and satisfying.
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A caterpillar decides to build a chrysalis and then cannot bear how long it takes, which is roughly every child waiting for anything. The joke is entirely on the side of the child rather than the grown-up saying wait. Good for reading before a long journey.
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The long game
Older children can grasp that some good things take months or years, and that sticking at something is its own skill.
Sent to live with a stern uncle, Lydia Grace patiently grows flowers in every corner she can find, month after month, until she finally coaxes a smile out of him. Told in letters across a whole year, it shows patience as something active rather than passive. Lovely and hopeful.
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Opal slowly builds a life in a new town over one long summer, with a stray dog’s help, and nothing about it happens quickly. It’s a beautiful book about things taking the time they take, including grief and friendship. A modern classic and a wonderful read-aloud.
or on Bookshop.org
The long wait
Older children can wait, but they want to know what for and roughly how long. What follows puts a character through a wait with no end date attached to it.
Peter walks three hundred miles back towards the fox he was made to abandon at the roadside, and the fox waits, and the chapters alternate between them. The whole book is endurance. There is a war, a mother who has died and a father with a temper, so it is not a light read.
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Stanley is sent to a desert camp for something he did not do and made to dig one hole a day, while a hundred years of family bad luck slowly comes good around him. It rewards a reader willing to wait for the pieces to fit. Very funny in a dry way.
or on Bookshop.org
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Something to do together
A simple countdown chart for something a child is longing for, so the waiting has a shape and an end they can see. I’m making it now, and it will live here soon.
Patience grows mostly through practice, and through discovering that the waited-for thing does actually arrive. Each successful wait makes the next one a little easier to bear.
So give a wait a visible shape where you can, a countdown or a chart, and try to keep your promises about when things will happen. And do let them be bored while they wait, since that’s where a good deal of patience is quietly built.
For you, the grown-up
There’s a companion page for grown-ups over on the main Book Quote Therapy library, with books for adults learning to wait.
Read the grown-up version →These pages are written for the grown-ups looking after a child: parents, teachers and carers. A good book can sit beside a worried child, though it never stands in for a real conversation, or for proper support when something feels too big to carry alone.