How to Use Daily Affirmations With I Can Do Hard Things

Nora started first grade in August, and for the two weeks before that she had one sentence for anything new. She could not do it. She was not good at it. She said it about the zipper on her backpack, about the bus, about a worksheet she had not even seen yet. I am not a teacher, a counselor or a librarian. I am a mom in Dayton, Ohio who works part time at the front desk of a dental office, and my usual move is to say something encouraging too fast and then watch it slide right off her.

So in the last week of August I bought I Can Do Hard Things by Gabi Garcia. It is an affirmation picture book, 36 pages, illustrated by Charity Russell, published by Skinned Knee Publishing, and the reading age on the listing is 3 to 7. There is no story in it. It is a run of short affirmations for hard moments, one after another, and the whole book is over in a few minutes. It has lived on our kitchen counter since the day it arrived, which turns out to be most of the method. What follows is what we actually did with it, about three mornings a week, from August into November.

Step 1: Put the book where the hard moment happens, not on the shelf

Our first mistake with earlier books was storage. I Am Enough lives on Nora's bedroom shelf because it is a bedtime book, and that is the correct home for it. I Can Do Hard Things is not a bedtime book. The hard moment in our house sits between the cereal bowl and the front door, so the book stayed on the kitchen counter, in the stack next to the napkin holder, exactly where I would bump into it at seven in the morning. If I had needed to walk to her room to get it, I would have quit by the second week. I know that about myself.

Three months in, that counter spot is the entire reason the habit exists. Nora reaches for it while I am pouring milk. She does not ask out loud. She just slides it over to her side of the counter, and that is my cue. No announcement, no sitting down properly, no lighting. The book is in the traffic of the morning rather than set apart from it. It also happens to be eight and a half inches square, which I did not think about when I ordered it and now notice every single morning. That size sits flat between the napkin holder and the fruit bowl without hanging over the edge. Anything wider would have gone into the sink by week two, and I would have blamed the book.

If your mornings happen somewhere else, put it there instead. By the door, in the car, on the step where shoes go on. The location is not a detail, it is the whole thing. A book that has to be fetched is a book that gets skipped on the exact mornings you need it.

Step 2: Read three or four pages and stop

The book is 36 pages. Do not read 36 pages at breakfast. I tried it once, in the first week, feeling virtuous, and it turned into a lecture with a cover on it. A lecture at seven in the morning is the fastest way I know to make a six year old dislike a book she was liking fine.

Garcia built the book in short pieces, and the short pieces are the point rather than a limitation. We read three pages, sometimes four. It takes about two minutes. That is shorter than a bowl of cereal, which is the honest test in our house. A reading that outlasts the food does not get repeated. I timed it once out of curiosity, three pages at her pace with the milk going and the toast getting cold, and it came in under two minutes. The one morning I read the thing end to end, we were finished in about six minutes, she asked if that was all, and neither of us enjoyed the rest of breakfast.

If she asks for more, I close it and tell her we will do more tomorrow. Leaving it slightly unfinished kept her coming back. Reading it cover to cover every single time made it feel like an assignment, and she is six, and she already has assignments.

Step 3: Read it with her, not to her

For the first week I read every page out loud by myself, and it landed about as well as reading the side of a cereal box. The change came when I started leaving the end of a page for her. I do not mean quizzing. I mean pausing, and if she wants to finish the line she finishes it, and if she does not, I finish it and we move on. No correcting, no asking her to repeat it properly.

Her own voice doing the saying matters more than mine does. An affirmation read silently by a parent is a nice sentiment hanging in the air. The same words in a six year old's own voice are something she carries to the door. That was the single adjustment that made the book worth keeping, and it cost me nothing.

Some mornings she does not want to say anything, and I read it alone and we go. Three mornings a week is our average, not a rule. We have had weeks with one morning in them and weeks with five. The mornings we force it are the mornings it does the least good, so I have stopped forcing it.

Step 4: Tie one page to one thing that is actually happening that day

A generic affirmation floating in a kitchen does nothing for my kid. What worked was naming the specific thing in the same breath as the page. If there is a fire drill that day, we read about loud and surprising things. If it is picture day, we read about being looked at. I do not add anything to the book. I just say the day's one thing out loud before we open it, and then she picks where we start.

This part is not in the book, and for us it is the part that made a difference. The book supplies words. The parent has to supply the situation, or the words have nothing to stick to. A child who has already heard the hard thing named out loud at breakfast meets it at ten in the morning with something in her pocket. The clearest one was picture day in September. I said the thing out loud at the counter, that a lot of people would be looking at her and that she would be standing in a line waiting her turn, and Nora went straight to a page about being looked at and read it twice without being asked. She still did not want her hair done. But she walked in without the fight we had the year before, and I noticed that.

Keep it to one thing. I tried listing three things once and got a flat stare and a request for more milk. One thing, then three pages, then shoes. That is the whole sequence and it takes less time than finding a hair tie.

Step 5: Keep it small, and be honest with yourself when it goes stale

The book is thin, it has no story, and it runs out of road with an older child. Nora is six and it fits her. Eli is ten and he is well past it, and he rolls his eyes at it, which is fair. If your child is eight or nine, this is probably not your book, and the listing's own reading age of 3 to 7 says so plainly. Garcia wrote it for the younger end.

Around the six week mark we hit a stretch where it felt like a chore to both of us. What helped was moving it back across the counter and letting Nora decide when it came out. What did not help was me announcing that we were going to keep up our routine. Anything with the word routine in it dies in our kitchen within a week.

And the honest part, because I would want it said to me. On the first morning of first grade, Nora was still nervous. She held my hand all the way up to the door and then she walked in. The book did not remove the nerves and I am not going to pretend it did. What shifted, slowly, is that she now has a set of words for a hard moment that are not the ones she walked in with. She still has rough mornings. I will take the shift.

The book did not remove the nerves. What changed is that she has words for them now that are not the ones she came in with.

What Else Helps

A book is one small tool, and it works better in a week that has sleep in it. The mornings we get the most out of three pages are the mornings after a full night, not the ones after a late one. That is not a professional opinion, it is just what I have watched for three months at my own counter. No book outruns a tired six year old. We had one Tuesday in October where the whole thing fell apart, and it was not the book's fault. Nora was up twice in the night, the bus came early, and I read two pages at her while she stared at the wall. Nothing landed. I put it back on the counter and drove her in. The next morning, same three pages, same counter spot, and she read the last line of the second page along with me. Nothing about the book changed between those two mornings. The night did.

We give each book one job, and that kept any of them from turning into wallpaper. The Magical Yet lives in the basket by the kitchen table and comes out on homework nights, because Nora's particular homework problem is the word yet, and that book is built around it. I Am Enough stays on the bedroom shelf as a bedtime book, about three nights a week, under five minutes. I Can Do Hard Things stays on the counter and belongs to school mornings only. Nobody in this house reads all three in one day.

For an older child the shape changes completely. Eli has the Big Life Journal, a hardcover guided journal, 112 pages, about 8 by 6 inches, listed for ages 5 to 11, and he writes in it after dinner at the kitchen table about four nights a week, five minutes at a time. It is a written practice, not a read aloud, which suits a ten year old who does not want to be read to in front of anyone. Some of the prompts feel young to him. He skipped most of April and May during baseball season and picked it back up in June. He raises his hand in math now and then. Not every day, and I am not going to dress that up.

The last thing I would tell you is that none of these books does the job alone and none of them is a fix for a child. Gabi Garcia wrote a short book of affirmations, and what it does is put words in a small person's mouth at a moment when she does not have her own. The rest is the same cereal and the same door and the same walk, over and over, until one morning the walk in is a little easier than it was. Some mornings it is not. You go again the next day.