You WILL share!

Finna, three and a half, loves storytime at the local library. She sits leaning against Miss P, tiny hand on her knee, concentrating with comical absorption and waiting her turn to open the flaps or turn the page with barely contained eagerness. After the story, there is drawing or craft time, which is tackled with equally serious enthusiasm. At 3, she is now able to restrict herself to just holding three or four crayons at once, rather than hogging the whole box, or in fact all the boxes on offer.

Last week, the five year old girl sitting next to Finna, Molly, was overcome by a passionate need for the red crayon. The one Finna had. One of three, admittedly, but nonetheless one she had chosen for her drawing and planned to use. Soon. Much fuss ensued, and after some failed tactical negotiations, Miss P attempted the Snatch and Grab solution. Finna is a tenacious little soul though, and simply closed her grip.

She kept the crayon.

Molly cried.

“Finny,” I said quietly. “Look at Molly. “She looks sad.” Finna could see this straight away, Molly’s tear streaked face and wobbling lip a surefire sign. I gave her a moment to think. “I think she would really like to use the red crayon.” A small moment passed, then Finna looked at her drawing, did a little scribble with the red crayon, and passed it on to Molly. “Thanks Finna, Molly looks really happy now.”

This approach is something I've read about and had to learn to do, and of course it doesn't always result in sharing. What I'm trying to achieve though is helping her with the beginnings of understanding that others have feelings and needs too, and that's what sharing is about, not simply the redistribution of belongings.

The library episode got me thinking about what children learn from our well meaning efforts to make them share (often for our own comfort and to appease other adults). The Snatch and Grab attempt might have convinced Finna that Miss P is not to be trusted not to steal her things. Had it worked, she may reasonably have concluded that it’s fine to snatch things off people, that problems with others can be solved with physical force, and that it’s ok to take things off other people if you’re bigger than them.

What’s more, she might have felt disrespected, disempowered and angry. I sure would have.

What the more hands - off approach is trying to communicate is that other people have feelings and needs, and that she will be trusted to understand that and respond in her own way with kindness and generosity. The beginnings, in other words, of compassion.

 I should add here that Miss P is genuinely kind and good with the children, and the approach she used is simply what most adults would have done. It is just common practice, and it's the approach and the assumptions behind it that I'm questioning here. The basic assumption is the Empty Vessel theory of childrearing, that children are a blank slate that adults are free to write on and chip away at to get just the shape they want. It's Behaviourism, the idea that you train children to be the way that you, and society, wants them. And if they don't respond as you'd like, you coerce, bribe, reward, punish, shame, threaten or force them to comply.

It isn't about co-operation, and it isn't about mutual respect, regardless of how nicely the details are presented.

Let’s go back to the Snatch and Grab, and the feelings of anger and being disrespected.

When I was in Year 10 in high school, I met a friend whom I continued to see, in patches, for the next 15 or so years (yes, that does date me…). She was a person who drifted through life, periodically requiring rescuing from one dramatic scenario or another. When she moved back from interstate, towing a boyfriend, she did so in a very ancient car which did the predictable thing and bailed on the journey several hours from its destination, which was my place. This friend, D, and her boyfriend consequently spent several weeks camped happily in my loungeroom burning whole forests worth of firewood before I organized with my landlord for them to rent the cottage behind my house.

My electricity bill that winter was triple what it normally was, as they were having trouble acclimatizing to the cooler weather and required the heater to be blaring tropical strength rays 24 / 7. I didn’t feel sharey enough to foot this. Then D requested to borrow my car (I might add here that I lived in the mountains in Victoria, a 25 minute drive from the nearest small town where I worked as a teacher) in order to check out some rentals. Sure, I said, just organize it with me so it’s do-able. When the day arrived, it turned out that I was ill and needed the car to travel to a health professional. D screamed violently at me, pursuing me down the driveway with a torrent of anger.

Time passed, both parties moved, and I did lend her and her hapless mate the car several times, as well as giving him a lift to work several times a week. The last time I saw this friend was on just one such occasion. As we pulled into the parking lot of the school, she reached for the keys, asking what time I’d like her to pick me up from work. “Er, but…” She had me, I was running late, and off she happily went for the day… in my car. My only car. The one I was working to pay off the loan for.

Did I mention it was mine?

When I finally said to her that afternoon upon dropping her and her boyfriend at home that in future she must ask to borrow my car, not just assume and take it, a physically violent outburst followed. It was almost comical in its friendship – ending intensity and involved theatrics like spitting in my face and giving the bonnet of my car a damn good thrashing with her handbag.

Why, apart from this being a storytelling kinda blog, tell that tale? Well, really, is it a lot different from Finna’s scenario in the library? To a three year old, is a crayon less precious than my car is to me? In that little mind, focused on the joy and flow of completing the drawing or bit of play or whatever, her things (even if they are the library’s things) are her things, and respecting that is every bit as important as it was to me that this particular (ex) friend respected my belongings. Do I let strangers ‘share’ my purse, use my car, or wander into our home as they wish?

Do you?

Finna had that red crayon first, so it was her turn to use it, and them’s the rules. The mere fact that someone else has suddenly decided that she wants it changes nothing.

Sharing is a nice idea, and it’s an important thing to learn to do, but how has it become the only thing that seems to be important? Our childcare philosophies seem hell bent on moulding our children into good communist citizens (and communism has in reality pretty much always been usurped by human nature, has almost always slid into some kind of dictatorship when natural the natural acquisitiveness of our species comes to the fore in strong individuals) while showing them strongly individualistic role models of adults keeping all our crap to ourselves.

Why doesn’t little Johnny want to share his truck with little Lisa? Perhaps Johnny sees his parents lock their car whenever they leave it so that no-one steals it. And that’s fair enough.

So am I advocating a purely selfish model of simply letting children have all their stuff to themselves and never think of others’ needs? Nup. What I am saying is that forcing children to give up their possessions may solve the adult’s immediate problem of stopping the tears and hassle, but it teaches children some concerning things, and I even feel that it delays and stunts the learning of healthy boundaries and true empathy and compassion.

Had you known me at the time I was having those problems with my one – sided sharing friend, what advice might you have given me? Had you known me in the past when I was involved in relationships in which I was emotionally abused and allowing the people involved to ‘walk all over me’ what might you have suggested? Probably, if you are sensible, that I needed to examine my own feelings of deservedness, and put some healthy boundaries in place in my relationships. Learn to say no sometimes.

By forcing children to ‘share’, particularly when they are not developmentally ready we are teaching them that there are no boundaries in relationships, or that they are not allowed or trusted to use some discernment in setting them. This is dangerous.

Studying children and their brain development shows us that ‘theory of mind’, the understanding that others have a different view of the world to yours and thus the beginnings of the development of the capacity for empathy, does not begin to develop until age five or six. So why do we expect three and four year olds to have vastly more compassion than we ourselves do and give everyone else things that they are using, or that are precious to them even if it is only in that moment?

When an adult redistributes the wealth by force, children feel disempowered and disrespected. Children resist sharing because they are at a developmental stage in which they are trying to define the boundaries of their existence, what is ‘me’ and what is ‘not me’. They need to be able to say ‘no’ in order to do that. Saying ‘no’ is part of saying ‘I am me’. It is intrinsic to the development of self esteem, and the ability to define what is safe and comfortable in our relationships with others and with the world.

At the extreme end is the concept of saying ‘no’ to things that we don’t want to happen to our bodies; children are taught to say no to inappropriate touching to protect them from sexual abuse. Adults in abusive relationships stay there, get there in the first place, because they either feel that they have no personal rights, no entitlement to say no to others’ unpleasant behaviours, or because they feel so disempowered that there is no point to saying no as it won’t be respected anyway.

So we’re teaching children that they say no and won’t be listened to. We’re teaching them that they have no say in what’s theirs, and that they can’t be trusted to resolve conflicts in caring ways. Is this a good idea?

By respecting children, by understanding where they are at developmentally, we can encourage the development of compassion in three ways.

Firstly, by doing as I did with Finna in the library scenario and simply directing her attention with no pressure to how the other child was feeling, we can help children begin to notice the feelings of others, and to empathise with those feelings. In that instance my daughter felt respected, saw another's need, and acted kindly of her own accord. Win / win as far as I was concerned.

A year ago she wouldn’t have been able to do that, and I would have avoided situations like that, or even said to the other child, “Finna has that right now, you can use it soon when she’s finished.” Then let her use it for a while and distract her with something else so the other child could have a turn. Or maybe the other child wouldn’t get a turn, sometimes that’s just how it is. And the same if Finna wanted something currently in an other child’s possession, with the addition of supporting her sad and angry feelings about not getting what she had her heart set on. Of course I don’t always get it right, of course it can be really uncomfortable and awkward with other parents or people like Miss P running activities. But I really feel that the passing adult discomfort is worth it.

Secondly, by showing children empathy and compassion ourselves, by guiding them respectfully and ensuring that they get their emotional needs met, we give them personal experience of compassion, and a role model for compassion. Personal experience and role modeling are the two very most powerful ways in which kids learn. From birth we can teach our kids about compassion and kindness by using those qualities in our dealings with them.

Third, it gives her autonomy, the knowledge that she is trusted and therefore obviously able, to make decisions for herself. To solve problems, social ones as well as logistical ones. It gives her absolutely vital practice in doing this in a safe setting, and enables her to observe and process the outcome and perhaps take that into account in similar situations in the future.

Children are all different, and have different levels and kinds of attachment to things. My daughter is a very sentimental person (yep, a chip off the old maternal block!) and she invests her playthings, pets and even food with a great deal of emotional energy. She is genuinely attached to those crayons, to her concept of how she will do that drawing, to that dropped sandwich that can’t simply be replaced by a new one but must be cleaned and returned to her. Other kids not so much. They will happily let another child play with their things.

The key is to know children individually and to genuinely respect those differences.

I am also not remotely suggesting that sharing, or teaching our kids to do that, is a bad thing. Forcing them to share, particularly before they are developmentally ready to understand why they might choose to do so, though, I think is. The next time you feel tempted to resolve a kid dispute with the Snatch and Grab approach, it may be worth considering how you would take it if a police officer wandered in and took your wallet to give to another parent who seemed, rather loudly, to want it.

The last thing that occurs to me here is to wonder why it is that we are so keen to insist that our children share nicely above all other considerations. Well, no one wants to look like a bad parent do they? No-one wants other parents to think that we are raising selfish kids who Can’t Share. And precious few people seem to have the patience or the will to work out what’s going on for kids, to help them solve social disputes for themselves, to allow the time it takes each individual child to come to sharing things, feelings and time with others out of genuine empathy.

Much easier to grab the disputed item, give it to the squeaky wheel and send the reluctant sharer to the corner for five minutes until he stops crying.

And yes, with our son suddenly mobile and doggedly determined to investigate everything, particularly Finna’s stuff, we are facing a whole new chapter in this book. Yes it’s tricky.

Yes it’s confronting.

Ultimately though, I really genuinely have faith in my daughter and respect her. She’ll move through it. Onto the next challenge, no doubt!