11 - I'm not ready to share

Trusting Children Podcast

We all want our children to be polite, generous and kind. We want to teach them how to share their possessions with others and we want them to act genuinely. When our child doesn’t want to give up an object we worry that they might be seen as being mean, greedy, nasty or selfish. In this episode I am going to explore what it really means to share, why there is so much pressure on sharing and how to deal with arguments over toys in social situations. When we are in a playground and our child is holding onto a toy for dear life with clearly no intention of giving it up while another child is hovering and wants to play with that toy we start to feel a bit uncomfortable. If you have ever felt this pressure to make your child “share” but not been entirely sure how to deal with a situation like this, then this episode is for you.

I talk about what sharing actually is and why it’s so hard for young children to do it, the developmental reasons for that; why we as parents or adults care so much about sharing and what it looks like in our adult world; the effects of adults forcing children to share and what we should do instead. And finally I will give you examples of how we can deal with these instances in social situations, like in a playground.

Show notes and transcript are available here.
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