"Share nicely" is probably the most-said sentence in any room with toddlers in it. It is said with good intentions, and it mostly does not work. Here is why, what is going on when a two-year-old shouts "mine", and what helps children learn to take turns and, eventually, to give.

The digger was yellow, about eleven centimetres long, and it was not even ours.

My son had been holding it for roughly four minutes when another little boy reached for it, and he produced the clearest word of his life so far: "MINE." What followed was four adults on a lounge floor, all saying versions of "we share, don't we" in voices slightly higher than our own, and one well-meaning hand coming down from above to take the digger and give it to the other child.

I wrote about that afternoon in the book, and the thing I keep coming back to is that the adults were the real subject of it. Two two-and-a-half-year-olds were doing exactly what children that age do. Four grown-ups were managing how it looked.

Why toddlers don't share

Think about what sharing, in the adult sense, actually requires. A child has to understand that the other child wants the thing. They have to hold that want in mind alongside their own. They have to recognise that another person's disappointment is real, even though it is happening in a head they cannot see into. They have to decide that their own pleasure is worth trading for the other child's. And then they have to override a strong impulse to act on that decision.

That is a lot of machinery, and most of it is still being built at two and a half.

The ability to understand that someone else can believe or want something different from you develops across the preschool years. In a classic experiment by Heinz Wimmer and Josef Perner, children watch a puppet put a marble in one place and leave the room. While the puppet is away, the marble is moved. Asked where the puppet will look for it, most three-year-olds point to where the marble really is. Somewhere around four or five, most children start pointing to where the puppet left it. There are earlier signs of this kind of understanding, and I do not want to draw the line too sharply, but it gives a sense of the timing.

There is a second mismatch too. At two and a half, children mostly play alongside each other rather than with each other: similar activities, side by side, watching and occasionally borrowing. Mildred Parten called this parallel play nearly a century ago. Cooperative play, with shared goals and negotiated roles, builds over the following couple of years. So the adults on that lounge floor were not only asking for a skill that was not there yet. We were expecting a kind of play that was still about eighteen months away.

So when we ask a two-year-old to share, we are often asking for a skill that is not available yet, and then treating its absence as a character flaw.

"Mine" is a concept arriving

The other thing I had backwards for a long time is that I thought ownership was the problem. It is closer to an achievement.

Somewhere in the second and third years, children work out that objects can belong to people, that this relationship lasts even when the object is out of sight, and that they are a person it can apply to. Lauren Fasig studied toddlers between 18 and 28 months and found they already had a basic understanding of what belonged to them and what belonged to someone else, and that this understanding was linked to how they described themselves. Ownership seems to be tied up with a child's developing sense of who they are.

A new idea is held very tightly, because it has not been tested yet. A toddler does not yet trust that if they put the digger down, it will come back. Taking it out of their hands to demonstrate fairness teaches them something true and unhelpful: possession is not stable, and the biggest person in the room decides.

You cannot be generous with something you are not sure you have.

What forced sharing tends to teach

When an adult makes a child hand something over, the child usually complies, because adults are bigger. What they learn is compliance under supervision, which is a different thing from generosity and tends to disappear when the supervisor leaves the room. A child who has things taken away often enough in the name of fairness can also learn to grab faster and hold tighter.

Meanwhile, the research on young children's kindness is quite striking. Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello found that toddlers as young as 18 months will spontaneously help an adult who is struggling, without being asked and without any reward. In a later study they found that rewarding 20-month-olds for helping actually made them less likely to help afterwards. The inclination is there. It does not need to be installed by instruction, and it can be crowded out by pressure.

What helps instead

Swap sharing for turn-taking. Sharing is a moral idea. Turn-taking is a procedure, and young children can learn procedures. The sentence I use is "You can have it when she's finished."

Notice that it is open-ended. Not a timer, not "two more minutes". A timer tells the waiting child that objects are removed by outside force, and tells the holding child their time is running out, which usually makes them hold on tighter. "When she's finished" tells the waiting child their turn is guaranteed, and tells the holding child nobody is coming to take it. In my experience children put things down remarkably quickly once the pressure is off. That is a practitioner's observation rather than a study, but I have seen it in a very large number of rooms.

Sit close and describe. Get down to their level and say what is happening without a verdict. "You've got the digger. He's waiting for a turn." "You're waiting. Waiting is hard." You are keeping both children company in a hard moment and giving them words they will eventually use themselves.

Wait thirty seconds before stepping in. Unless someone is about to get hurt, move closer and watch. Sometimes children sort it out in a way you would not have thought of. If it escalates, you step in exactly as you would have, thirty seconds later, and you have lost nothing.

Protect the special things. Children do not have to share everything. Adults do not. Before friends come over, put away the two or three things that really matter to your child. Everything else is fair game.

Talk to the adults, not just the children. One sentence said early and lightly can take the pressure off a whole room: "They're not really up to sharing yet, we're just doing turns." It sounds like an explanation for the other parents. It is actually permission for everyone, including you.

For teachers and kaiako

Centres have an advantage here, because the environment can do some of the work. Enough of the popular resources that turns are not constant. A simple, visible way of knowing whose turn is next. Adults who sit near the busy spots and narrate rather than referee.

Te Whāriki describes children learning, over time, "strategies for resolving conflicts in peaceful ways", and notes that kaiako have an important role in helping children start and keep relationships with their peers. The phrase "over time" is doing a lot of work there. Conflict over objects is not a failure of the programme. It is the curriculum, happening.

When does sharing actually show up?

Later than adults want, and from a different direction than we usually teach it.

My son gave something away, unprompted, to a smaller child at a playground when he was about four. I remember standing there completely blindsided. Nobody had told him to. By then he had had two years of being fairly sure that what was his would stay his.

That turns out to be the order it goes in. Children learn to give once they are confident they can keep.

Sources

  • Wimmer, H., & Perner, J. (1983). Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception. Cognition, 13(1), 103-128. doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(83)90004-5
  • Fasig, L. G. (2000). Toddlers' understanding of ownership: Implications for self-concept development. Social Development, 9(3), 370-382. doi.org/10.1111/1467-9507.00131
  • Warneken, F., & Tomasello, M. (2006). Altruistic helping in human infants and young chimpanzees. Science, 311(5765), 1301-1303. doi.org/10.1126/science.1121448
  • Warneken, F., & Tomasello, M. (2008). Extrinsic rewards undermine altruistic tendencies in 20-month-olds. Developmental Psychology, 44(6), 1785-1788. doi.org/10.1037/a0013860
  • Parten, M. B. (1932). Social participation among pre-school children. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 27(3), 243-269. doi.org/10.1037/h0074524
  • Ministry of Education. (2017). Te Whāriki. Mana tangata | Contribution strand. Te Whāriki online