A book can help with
For saying the thing that needs saying, even when your voice shakes.
Speaking up is hard at any age. For a child it means risking being wrong in front of everybody, or annoying a friend, or drawing attention when blending in feels safer. So a great many children swallow it: the answer they knew, the unfairness they saw, the thing that made them uncomfortable.
Books help by rehearsing it. Watching a character work up to saying something, and finding the sky doesn’t fall, gives a child a template they can borrow. And the ones about speaking up for somebody else are quietly the most useful, since it’s often easier to be brave on a friend’s behalf than your own.
Here’s what I’d reach for. Find your child’s age and start there.
Using your voice
At this age it’s about saying what you think and what you need, in a room full of louder people.
Molly Lou’s grandmother taught her to use her big voice for good, so when a bully starts on a new pupil she knows exactly what to do. It covers speaking up for others and owning your own mistakes, all without a hint of lecturing. Cheerful and emboldening.
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Chrysanthemum loves her long name until she’s teased for it and her confidence collapses, until a teacher turns the whole thing around. It shows how much a child needs somebody to speak up on their behalf when they can’t. Gentle, and a favourite for good reason.
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Saying the hard thing
Older children can grasp that speaking up sometimes costs something, and choose to do it anyway.
Wanda is teased for her one faded dress, and the girl who watched and said nothing must live with her silence. It is short, quiet and devastating about the cost of not speaking up, and children remember it for years. A Newbery Honor book.
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Shayla likes rules and hates trouble, until things happening around her, and to people she loves, start to feel too wrong to stay quiet about. She ends up joining a protest and finding a voice she didn’t know she had. It takes on the Black Lives Matter movement and police violence in a way that’s pitched carefully for this age, so it’s one to know the contents of before you hand it over. But for a child working out that speaking up can matter more than staying comfortable, it’s a warm and encouraging place to begin.
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Saying it out loud
By eleven a child usually knows what they think and has worked out that saying it carries a cost. What follows is about paying it anyway.
A very funny family road trip that drives straight into the Birmingham church bombing, and the funniness is exactly what makes the ending land. The speaking up here belongs mostly to the adults, with Kenny watching them, which is the point of it. Read it yourself first.
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Jingwen has moved to Australia with almost no English and describes himself as an alien, so everything he wants to say comes out wrong or not at all. Half comic, half prose. He bakes his way towards being understood, which works better than it sounds.
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Something to do together
A page of ready-made sentences for the moments that are hard to start, from ‘I don’t like that’ to ‘can I say something’. I’m making it now, and it will live here soon.
A child who is used to being listened to at home finds it far easier to speak up elsewhere. The practice starts at your kitchen table, in whether their opinion gets taken seriously even when it’s inconvenient.
So let them disagree with you sometimes and change your mind occasionally when they’re right, give them the actual words for the hard sentences, and make a fuss of it when they say something difficult. And do tell them plainly that speaking up to a trusted grown-up about anything worrying is always the right thing to do.
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.