The Affirmation Book We Read Before the First Day of School

The week before first grade started, I did what a lot of moms do late at night at the kitchen counter. I bought a book. Nora had spent the whole summer saying she couldn't do things. Couldn't do the monkey bars. Couldn't write her name the way the teacher wanted. Couldn't walk into a room without me. Kindergarten had been a long year of small refusals, and I was bracing for more of it. I typed confidence books for kids into the search bar and scrolled until my eyes hurt. What I finally bought was I Can Do Hard Things by Gabi Garcia, a book of affirmations for ages 3 to 7.

I picked it over the dozens of others for boring reasons. The listing said 36 pages and eight and a half inches square, which fits on a lap and slides into a tote bag. It said reading age 3 to 7, and Nora had just turned 6. It was illustrated by Charity Russell and published by Skinned Knee Publishing. What the listing did not promise was a story, and that turned out to be the honest part. I Can Do Hard Things is a book of short affirmations, one thought at a time, built for the two minutes before you walk out the door. It came out in 2018, so it is not new, and thousands of parents have already said their piece about it.

We started reading it at breakfast. Not the whole thing, because the whole thing is more than a nervous kid wants at seven in the morning. Three or four pages, me reading, her chewing, the kettle rattling. It lives on the kitchen counter now, next to the fruit bowl and the pile of school papers, because that is where we are at quarter past seven. Three mornings a week, give or take. Some weeks two. Some weeks five.

The first day of first grade was a Tuesday. I want to be careful about what I tell you next, because this is where a review like this usually turns into a commercial. Nora read three pages with me at the counter that morning, then she got quiet. She was still nervous in the car. She was still nervous in the parking lot. She held my hand all the way to the door, and I stood there while the teacher said good morning, and then Nora let go and walked in. That is the whole result. She went in.

Nobody should read that as the book taking her nerves away. It did not. She has had rough mornings since, including one in October when she cried in the driveway over a spelling test. What the book did was give us a phrase we both use now, and it is not brave or happy. It is hard. Hard things. That is a smaller promise than the louder books make, and I have come to trust it more because of that.

She was still nervous at the door. She walked in anyway. That is the whole result, and I am not going to dress it up.

Here is what the book actually is, in practice. Thirty-six pages, one affirmation at a time, with no story to carry you forward. Garcia keeps each page short, which means it works best the way we use it: a few pages, then conversation, then shoes. It does not work if you sit down to read it like a bedtime book. Nora tried that once, early on, and was done by page six.

The thinness cuts both ways. It is short, and there is not much of it, which is exactly why a six year old will let you read it before school when she would not sit still for forty pages. It also means there is nothing in it for an older child. Eli is 10 and in fifth grade. He looked at it once, over my shoulder, and went back to his own things. I would not hand this to a nine year old and expect it to land.

What surprised me is where it ended up in our week. I bought it for the first day of school and assumed it would be a one week thing, used for a season and then shelved with the other parenting purchases you feel vaguely guilty about. It is November now and the book is still on the counter. We read it three mornings a week and I have not moved it once. Garcia wrote something my kid picks up without being told to, which is a different and better thing than something I have to remember to enforce.

There are mornings it does nothing. She looks at the cover and says she does not want to. Fine. I put it back and we talk about shoes instead. A book is a tool, and tools sit in the drawer some days. If you want something that gets a nervous kid out the door every single morning without a fight, no book will do that, and I would not trust one that claimed it could.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I would tell you to buy it for the mornings, not for the whole childhood. It is a short book with a narrow job, and it does that job for a kid between three and seven. I would tell you to read a few pages and then stop and let your child say something back, because the conversation does more work than the page does. And I would tell you not to expect your child to announce that she feels confident. Nora never has. What she does is hold my hand at the door and then let go, and some mornings she does it before I have said a word, and I notice.

I would also tell you that you are allowed to buy a small book without it having to fix anything. I bought five of them across a year, one at a time, and this is the one that sits on my counter. That is not a verdict on your child or on the other books. It is just where we landed.