Sharing is (S)caring!

‘It cannot be better than this’ he thought: He wanted to know if the car doors could be opened or if it will run very fast and then suddenly, someone spoiled this wonderful experience and asked him to please share the car with his friend. ‘But he is not even my friend, and I don’t know what sharing means’, thought Tom. He started to cry, ‘It’s mine’ he cried.

Today Tom learned a difficult lesson; that nothing belongs to you here at school and everything needs to be shared. Sharing is certainly scaring!

Teaching toddlers and pre-schoolers for the past 17 years, I have always had the unsettling feeling that the concept of ‘sharing’ is not always the way to go. In fact, it is always quite a challenge to help very young children understand this complex social requirement. Most typically, children at this age will not begin to understand and willingly share with peers until perhaps 5 years and beyond in some cases.

The question arises, is sharing always caring, or is it scaring? A young child who has had the whole world revolve around him with the home environment to himself has great difficulty understanding the concept of sharing when he steps inside a place called ‘the classroom’. Upon entering, he sees the wonderful toys and interesting areas to explore and doesn’t understand why he cannot access everything without being disturbed. Sharing is just a word for young children that they repeatedly hear when they need to part with their favorite possession, thus attaching negative connotations to the term. In the child’s mind, this defeats the idea that ‘sharing’ is something good, empathic, and caring.

Sharing is an important aspect of human social cooperation, rooted in early evolution. Studies have shown that infants as young as 8 months old demonstrate spontaneous offering of food and other objects to parents (e.g., Hay & Murray, 1982; Hay, 1979; Rheingold, Hay, & West, 1976).

However, although sharing can emerge quite early in some cases, it appears to be a typical challenge for young children. Toddlers rarely share toys with their peers, though the rate of spontaneous sharing increases from 12 to 30 months of age (e.g., Brownell, Svetlova, & Nichols, 2009; Hay, Castle, Davies, Demetriou, & Stimson, 1999; Levitt, Weber, Clark, & McDonnell, 1985). Additionally, other research has shown that preschoolers find sharing a challenge. For example, children aged between 3 and 5 years reserved 10 pieces of food for themselves while sharing only one piece of food with their peers (Birch & Billman, 1986). Sharing is difficult for young children probably because it results in a sacrifice of something valued for someone else’.