Why We Shouldn't Force Kids to Share

Imagine if you were joyfully riding your bike and another adult came up to you and said they wanted to ride your bike. Then, another adult swooped in and told you to share with this unknown person. Maybe you’re nicer than me, but I’d peddle myself out of there and not look back.

I don’t like to share my belongings against my will. If it’s my choice, I feel generous and love to give gifts, especially food, to my close friends and family. So why do so many parents force small children to share?

Holden is nearing two and the S word has found us everywhere we go and it has started to feel like a bad word that elicits outbursts and whininess in children. Fortunately, I found an antidote to this obnoxious cultural obsession in the form of Heather Shumaker’s book (and one of my favorite parenting books of all time), It’s OK Not to Share and Other Renegade Rules for Raising Compassionate Kids.

Shumaker’s book is made up of 29 renegade rules that are mainly focused on allowing children to be children. It gives parents language to use with their children that is respectful and developmentally appropriate. For example, instead of saying, you have to share and expecting children to share on demand, Shumaker advocates for taking turns and allowing children to share when they are all done with their turn. The first time I tried out her language was on my then 2 and 4 year-old niece and nephew. The 2-year-old went to grab a toy out of her big brothers’ hands. I told her, when he’s all done you can have a turn. Less than a minute later, he handed it over willingly. I sat there in shock. Maybe this first experiment was a fluke. But it has worked every single time on many different kids. It is calm and respectful and for some reason, kids seem to be encouraged to pass along their toy to another kid voluntarily. It honestly feels like magic.

Of sharing and development, Shumaker wrote,

You can wish your two-year-old could share, but developmentally, she’s not ready. Sharing comes in stages. Young kids can be trained to give up a toy on command to please an adult, but experts on children’s moral development, like William Damon, say a notion of true, altruistic sharing doesn’t begin until elementary-school age. Children younger than five share sometimes, most often to get something they want.

When children do not immediately get a toy because the other kid “has to share” they learn some of the most important and challenging lessons in life such as delayed-gratification and impulse control. Shumaker wrote that when adults insist on sharing before children are ready, the consequence is that true generosity develops slower and the child might share in front of an adult to please them, but not if an adult isn’t present. I can remember kids like this from when I was little who seemed to perform in front of adults and then act like total assholes when they were no longer onstage.

Instead of forced sharing, Shumaker believes in kids’ right to play uninterrupted. She said that sharing, as a concept, is confusing for grown ups because,

We mix up the right to property (“It’s mine!”) with the right to play (the child is busy). This is especially strong since American culture gives so much weight to individual property and what ‘belongs’ to whom. But turn-taking is not really about property at all. It’s about learning social awareness and protecting precious playtime.

As children get older, they get better at using moral reasoning. Around age four, they are able to understand sharing, but it’s not until around age eight when they start engaging in equal sharing. Just as we would not expect our children to walk or talk before they are developmentally ready, we shouldn’t expect them to share before they’ve developed this form of moral understanding. Instead, we should respect our children’s development and learn to work with them as guides that lead by example and help them cultivate their compassion, generosity and prosocial behaviors. One of my favorite parts about Shumaker’s book is that she stands up for children’s rights and offers guidance to parents about how to protect those rights. Instead of controlling relationships and behaviors, she encourages acknowledging emotions and facilitating relationships between children.

I love this book (and Janet Lansbury’s work on respectful parenting). I want all my parenting friends to read it and become renegade parents with me because it is so much less stressful than what I see everyday in the world. This book is about respecting children where they are at and offering support and understanding instead of punishment and control. It might take some getting used to but is really is ok not to share.

References

Nelder, Karri, Crimston, Daniel, Wilks, Matti, Redshaw, Jonathan, and Nielsen, Mark. “The Developmental Origins of Moral Concern: An Examination of Moral Boundary Decision Making Throughout Childhood.” PLoS ONE 13, no. 5 (2018): e0197819. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0197819

Shumaker, Heather. It’s OK Not to Share and Other Renegade Rules for Raising Compassionate Kids. New York, NY: Penguin Books (2012).