Teaching Children to Share: It's More Than Just Taking Turns
Learning how to teach your child to share is about much more than taking turns with toys. Sharing helps young children develop empathy, communication skills, healthy boundaries, and confidence in social relationships. With patient guidance and age-appropriate expectations, parents can help children build these important lifelong skills.
We’ve all heard the age old saying sharing is caring, but what does it look like in practice? Several aspects of sharing must be examined to even know the right questions to ask. What’s the goal of sharing? How is it best implemented? How can we set up our little ones for sharing success? Let’s examine ways to get the hang of sharing!
What Is the Goal of Sharing?
A common but misplaced goal of sharing is that the intention of sharing in early childhood is to create equality or maybe even reduce possessiveness. Developmentally appropriate goals of sharing include personal agency, empathy, awareness and independence in social interactions. Personal agency is a sense of control with oneself and one’s environment. This means sharing is asking, not taking.
How to Teach Sharing at Home
Modeling sharing should start at home with children as early as 18 months. Those little yummy bites of questionably mushed food that they stretch out to give? “Ooooo can I have some? Thank you for sharing!” They want something you have? Share freely so long as there’s been asking or offering. Where balance comes into play is the introduction to boundaries within sharing. “Not this time, my love. This pen is special to me. I don’t want to share that one right now, but here are some crayons you can use if you’d like.” This prepares children for higher levels of social interaction in the gentlest and safest of settings. Most emotional processing, including dysregulation, children might respond with is a completely normal sign of new developmental growth. Regulation during sharing takes practice.
Prepare Your Child for Sharing Success
A few highlights of preparing children for successful sharing include categorizing toys, building awareness of others thoughts and emotions, and talking through possible scenarios. Let’s say you have an upcoming pre-k age play date. Often children will want to show their favorite toy to a new friend. They are also highly likely to be more territorial or feel violated if something goes wrong with a high attachment toy. Try, “Hey bud, I know you LOVE your remote control car. If you want to share it with your friend, are you going to be okay if he crashes it or uses it in a way you wouldn’t?” Help them process out what are sharing toys, special to me toys, toys with enough to go around, and toys that require turn taking. Timers are an excellent way to introduce turn taking. Practice sharing vocabulary for turn taking including, “Can I have that?” “When you’re done with that, can I have a turn?” “I’m not done using this yet, but I’ll let you have a turn in 5 minutes.”
Sharing Builds More Than Generosity
In the end, remember the goals of sharing are to create independence, promote healthy social interaction and are often a child’s first encounter with boundaries, especially at a peer level. Start modeling as early as possible, and by preschool ages 3 to 4, start practicing scenarios and how to respond. Sharing is caring, and sharing is also asking, waiting, noticing and giving.
Every everyday interaction is an opportunity to help your child grow. The People Grower provides practical, research-informed parenting resources to help families build confident, compassionate, and resilient children. Explore our Services or reach out to see how we can support your family.
