Why I Stopped Forcing My Kid to Share

The trouble began with the truck. We usually went to the playground with only snacks: water and some Cheez-Its or an applesauce pouch. But one day, my son wanted to bring a toy. So we arrived with his little yellow excavator truck, which he rolled in zigzags on the sidewalk and then used to dig up mulch and dump it back on the ground in a pile. He was 3, and suddenly the most popular child on the playground.

A few kids circled around him as he played, staring at the truck. Their parents stared at me. I knew what everyone was thinking: The other kids wanted a turn; the parents expected me to tell my son to share; and my own child was oblivious, delightedly zooming his truck through the dirt.

If he didn’t offer to share, and I didn’t force him to, the other parents would think he was spoiled. But he loved that truck. Did he have to give it up just because this ring of kids wanted him to? One child kept trying to snatch the truck away. “No,” his mother said. He tried running at the toy; she had to grab him and hold him back. Finally, he released a scream that went on and on like a dial tone. I felt terrible. “Okay,” I told my son. “Let’s share.” I pulled the truck from his hands and dragged him, wailing, over to the swings.

His tears are good, I told myself. He needs to learn how to share, and this is his lesson. Parents make this choice multiple times every day; it’s part of helping kids grow up into responsible adults. But for weeks, I kept revisiting what had happened. I had made another child happy by making my own child suffer. Of course I wanted to raise a child with a sense of fairness, someone generous who cared about others’ feelings. But was forcing him to share like that right, or helpful?  

[Daniel Smith: Boredom is the price we pay for meaning]

As a girl, I was taught that one always has to share. And I grew up into a people pleaser. I was the easygoing friend, the one who stayed at the club long after I wanted to go home to sleep; the “That’s okay” friend who never admitted if my feelings had been hurt; the helpful volunteer who’d drive an hour out of my way so that my friend didn’t have to pay for an Uber home. Silencing my own needs has always been easier for me than telling someone else no. Was I raising my son to be the exact same way?

We tell our toddlers to share, but why? One friend told me she saw sharing as transactional: She wanted her son—an only child—to understand that if he wanted to play with other kids’ toys, he was going to have to share his own. That seemed reasonable enough. Another friend told me that she believed sharing was “an expression of care and empathy, and acknowledgment that the human experience is not singular, but shared.” But you can’t expect a 3-year-old to understand that!

There is evidence that kindness and altruism are innate, or at least demonstrated by even the youngest children. Researchers at the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences found, in a trial of almost 100 19-month-olds, that even children who were hungry themselves would give a treat to a stranger lacking food.  Researchers have also found that children as young as 12 months can express worry for a person who is suffering and occasionally step in to console them; children may also point to an object if they notice an adult looking for it, showing a desire to help.  

But children are not just short adults, Eileen Kennedy-Moore, a clinical psychologist who specializes in parenting and child development, reminded me. “They really think differently than we do,” she said. Children don’t develop what’s called a theory of mind—the cognitive ability to understand that other people have feelings and perspectives different from their own—until age 4. If you tell a 2-year-old to share, Kennedy-Moore said, they simply won’t understand, because they’re likely to see their toys as literally a part of themselves. “What they hear is Slice off part of your body and give it to someone else, and this makes absolutely no sense to them.”

Around age 4, this changes, because a child can at least understand what you mean when you tell them to share. But they still might not want to do it. Self-determination theory holds that humans have three innate psychological needs: to feel like they have autonomy, to feel like they have the competence to get things done, and to feel connected to other people. Sharing “touches on all three things,” Maryam Abdullah, a developmental psychologist, told me. “Sharing is an independent decision to provide some goodness with someone else.” The key word here, however, is independent.

Forcing a kid to share risks teaching them that generosity is “something that I am coerced to do, and it doesn’t feel good,” Abdullah said. They will feel that “someone more powerful than me is telling me to part from the very thing that I love right now.” That “takes away the basic need of autonomy.”

This doesn’t mean that you should just let your kid keep their toys to themselves and ignore other kids, however. If you encouraged that kind of behavior, they probably wouldn’t make many friends. Fortunately, there’s an alternative: Instead of telling a kid to share, Kennedy-Moore said, tell them to take turns.

Around the ages of 4 or 5, children can learn about dividing things evenly, Kennedy-Moore said. They also begin to appreciate fairness—to want to uphold and enforce it—and to understand that there are social expectations to collaborate with others. Above all, they understand that taking turns means they’ll eventually get the toy back. Taking turns, Abdullah said, involves “a form of fairness and justice” that all of us come to “expect and depend on in our social interactions.”

[Read: The isolation of intensive parenting]

Kennedy-Moore told me I should stop worrying about preventing my son from being a people pleaser. “Don’t think about outcomes; think about skills,” she said. “We want to help our kids to develop the skills that they’re going to need to create a life that is meaningful and satisfying to them.” That entails learning both to speak up for themselves and to compromise with others. Sometimes, a child will have to do something he doesn’t like, “and that’s just how the world works.” Of course, the kid might be frustrated, but “frustration is temporary and tolerable.”

A couple of weeks ago, I took my son and his friends to our local recreation center to play. All three boys had remote-control monster trucks, and wanted to bring them along.  On the way there, they raced the trucks down the sidewalk, the wheels surging over hardened snow, while I played referee, making sure the trucks didn’t go into the street. The play area was deserted except for two brothers. Of course, they, too, wanted to play with a monster truck. And of course, neither my son nor his friends wanted to give theirs up.

One of the brothers started crying. “Can that boy have a turn?” I asked my son. He shook his head no, and continued playing. Shame clouded my mind, but I decided not to force him, and to wait and see what happened. The other mother picked up her kids’ coats. “Time to go,” she announced, and began trying to drag them away.

But then I watched as my son walked to the crying boy and handed him the truck. A few minutes later, his two friends shared theirs as well. I turned to the boys’ mom and we smiled at each other. She put the coats back down, and we sat side by side watching the kids relish their new friends, the reward of their decision to share.