By Carol McCloud
The picture book behind the "bucket filler" language a lot of schools use: everyone carries an invisible bucket, and everything you do either fills it or empties it.
There's no story in this one, and that's on purpose. It tells your child that every person carries an invisible bucket, and that the bucket holds all their good feelings about themselves. Do something kind and you put a little into someone's bucket. Be mean, leave someone out, say the cutting thing, and you reach in and take some out. Then comes the part that gives the book its point: filling somebody else's bucket fills your own at the same time, and dipping into theirs empties yours too. So being unkind never gets you anything. The last page asks the question in the title and just leaves it there.
This is a lesson wearing a picture book's coat, and it helps to know that going in. There's no character to love and no plot, and a child who came for a story will feel the difference within a few pages. What it has instead is one metaphor so clean that a four-year-old gets it on the first read and can still use it in third grade. That's why classrooms have run on this book for twenty years. Once everyone knows what a bucket is, the speeches stop. You can say "that was a dip" and your child knows what you mean, and so does everyone else at the table. What you get is a shared word for kindness more than a bedtime story.