Do You Teach Your Kids To Share?

I talk about my 5 year old Brody all the time on air and online. There is always a story, a lesson learned. Brody has 4, soon to 5, cousins that are younger than him. When they're all together, it's time for them to share their toys or snacks or whatever, right? I'm not so sure we've been teaching them the proper way to handle sharing after reading an article my wife tagged me in on Facebook.The blog post comes from moms.popsugar.com. It was written by 'Very Bloggy Beth and has at the time of this post, over 12,000 reactions and 260,000 shares. (My wife being one of them)

To sum it up, Very Bloggy Beth writes that she doesn't force her son to share. When he started pre-school there was a "policy" in place. The policy made kids 'wait'. For example if little Suzie was playing with a doll and little Mary Ann wanted to play with it, Mary Ann would have to wait till Suzie was DONE, not interrupt little Suzie's play and force her to give up the doll.

Very Bloggy Beth's post also says:

My second story happened one morning at the local rec center. Friday mornings they fill the gym with tons of Little Tykes climbing structures and those plastic cars they can drive around, tricycles, big balls, even a bouncy castle. Basically a toddler's dream play room. There's this one red car in particular my son really likes playing with, and the last time we went, he drove it around the entire hour and a half we were there. While most of the moms with smaller kids will shadow their kids as they play, my son is old enough now that I can sit on the sidelines and watch. From there I watched a mom whose son wanted to drive the car approach my son repeatedly, saying, "OK, now it's time for you to give him a turn!" Of course he ignored her, and eventually she gave up. There were a million other little cars for her son to drive, including one that was almost identical. Or maybe I would have stepped in at some point.

 

And then tells us how she feels:

 I think it does a child a great disservice to teach him that he can have something that someone else has, simply because he wants it. And I can understand the desire to give your children everything they want; we all have it. But it's a good lesson for you both to learn that this isn't always possible, and you shouldn't step all over other people to get these things.

 

Read her post here and let me know if your see her point. I may introduce a "policy" of my own.