Stop teaching your kids to share. It’s a terrible lesson. Teach them to cooperate instead.
The other day I was watching my two young children play together. My six-year-old was trying to build a block tower, and his three-year-old brother was, shall we say, being “helpful.” For example, he would grab a block from his brother’s building and put it in his collection. Or he would try to hand his brother a piece unsuitable for the structure.
My six-year-old would get frustrated and try to take the block away from his brother, at which point my three-year-old would start to cry. It was a frustrating cycle that was going nowhere fast.
I eventually intervened and showed my six-year-old how to build his tower so that his brother couldn’t knock it over. And then I talked with my three-year-old about how we don’t destroy other people’s creations. It was like putting a band-aid over a bullet hole because it wasn’t long before they went right back at it.
The whole experience got me thinking about how we teach cooperation vs. sharing to our kids. When my kids were fighting over the blocks, I could have said, “sharing is caring.” But that would have been the wrong lesson.
Here’s why:
Sharing is about giving up something you have. It’s about taking what’s yours and making it available to someone else, even if that person doesn’t need it or want it–even if you need it. Cooperation, on the other hand, is about working together to achieve a common goal.
When you tell your child to share their toys with their sibling, you’re teaching them that it’s okay to give up what they have, even that they are expected to give up what they have. Perhaps this is acceptable to most people regarding material things, but it is a much more invasive concept when it applies to personal space or autonomy. It is also much easier to force sharing on a child than on an adult. We don’t expect adults to share in the same way.
Forced sharing teaches kids that a toy, for example, is not theirs when it is or that no matter how hard they work to achieve something, someone else can just come along and take it away. It teaches children that sharing feels awful.
But when you teach children to cooperate instead, you’re showing them how to negotiate and work as one. They learn that they can still have what they want while also helping others achieve what they want. They can show love, kindness, and empathy without giving in or giving up.
Sharing often placates demanding and impatient children, teaching them to expect and anticipate others to share. Soon enough, they are demanding it! Which is not a positive behavior either. Cooperation teaches patience.
So what can you do instead?
I told my kids that we were going to take turns playing with blocks. It is your brother’s turn, and it will be your turn when he is done. You can build whatever you want when it is your turn, and he can’t touch it. And when it is his turn, he gets to create whatever he wants, and you can’t touch it either. We’ll take a picture of you both with your creation when you are finished.
In short, sharing is a terrible lesson to teach your kids. Cooperation is a much better way to teach them how to interact with others.
These ideas come from a few different sources, including Tik Tok and an exciting book called, It’s Okay Not to Share and Other Renegade Rules for Raising Competent and Compassionate Kids by Heather Shumaker.