The Parents Who ‘Don’t Teach Sharing’
This past October, in a Facebook parents’ group I belong to, a mother sought advice for a perennial dilemma: Her son had been enjoying the park swing when another child asked for a turn. Her 3-year-old son didn’t want to get off. He didn’t budge — even as the other child waited, and waited, and asked again, politely.
But this mom wasn’t concerned with her 3-year-old monopolizing the swing set. Instead, she asked the group, “What do you say to get the other child to stop pressuring my son?”
“We don’t teach sharing,” she explained. She is not alone: In the age of gentle parenting, sharing itself, once the most basic playground skill, is now being called into question. Many parents, influencers, and educators believe that asking young children to step away from the slide is developmentally inappropriate, damaging to their mental health, and teaches a dangerous form of people-pleasing. Some advocate for waiting until kids are old enough to want to share, then letting them develop this behavior on their own, arguing that this will lead to genuine generosity paired with firm boundaries. To me, the parent of a 6-month old, the idea that indulging my daughter’s selfishness now will inspire her future charity sounded as preposterous as putting Mountain Dew into her bottles in hopes she’ll love water later.
One thing I do know, confirmed by everyone I’ve spoken to from gentle-parenting advocates to ethnographers and developmental psychologists, is that forcing toddlers to do things usually backfires, whether you want Charlotte to take turns on the slide or Oliver to share his Christmas presents with his brothers.
So, should we give up sharing altogether and let our toddlers be assholes? Is there a middle ground between raising a pint-size bully or a spineless doormat? “I think this whole idea that we’re ‘not teaching’ children things is insane,” Michaeleen Doucleff, author of Hunt, Gather, Parent told me. “Our society teaches middle- and upper-class children to be entitled.”
On any given weekday, there are 12 children playing in Tovah Klein’s classroom in upper Manhattan, and they are certainly not sharing. At the Barnard Toddler Center, veteran teachers and college students play with 2- and 3-year-olds on periwinkle rugs. The miniature wooden chairs and beige faux-terrazzo floors would fit into any Montessori classroom, but behind a mirrored wall, parents watch, developmental psychology students take notes, and researchers collect data for the many studies conducted here.
The project is Center director Klein’s life mission. Known as the “Toddler Whisperer,” Klein has spent the past 30 years at Barnard researching social-emotional development and writing influential books such as 2013’s How Toddlers Thrive (featuring a foreword by former Toddler Center parent Sarah Jessica Parker). At the Center, kids play with toys as long as they wish. If Olivia is rolling a firetruck and Henry wants it, teachers encourage Olivia, “Hold on tight if you need that!” If both kids grab at the toy, teachers tell both of them, “Hold on tight!” If Olivia loses in the skirmish, a teacher commiserates and advises: “Hold on tighter next time.”
“We actually have multiples of every item in our classroom,” Klein told me, so that teachers can offer children a duplicate in these situations — along with a reminder that, at the Toddler Center, there’s enough for everyone. Klein told me that when student interns encounter the Center’s sharing philosophy, “They all say how wacky they thought it was initially” but then find it a huge relief “to allow a child to have what they need or want, then move on.”
“Why do toddlers stubbornly refuse to share?” Klein asks in How Toddlers Thrive. “The simple answer is, they can’t.” Klein subscribes to the dominant Western theory that young children are egocentric, “focused on Me and Mine.” Even if they occasionally offer a friend a lollipop, they cannot truly share because they don’t yet know other people have different perspectives. At age 2 or young 3, “their job is to first figure out what ownership means,” Klein writes. “Children who are pushed to share too soon remain selfish until much older ages.”
Gentle-parenting proponents have taken this advice to heart and make it sound like 2-year-old Betty is as capable of taking turns as she is of solving differential equations. “Sharing ‘just happens’” one r/gentleparenting Reddit mom told me: It’s “a milestone like rolling over or starting solids. They are not developmentally ready to share until a certain age.” What age is that? Estimates range from age 3½ to 6.
Similarly to how pushing potty training too soon can trigger years of accidents, the sharing-wary warn that it promotes bad boundaries before children have established their own identities. In a podcast episode called “It’s Okay Not to Share,” psychologist and parenting expert Dr. Becky Kennedy advises parents, “Not sharing in childhood sets kids up to be able to prioritize their own needs and to have things in life that they want for themselves.”
It’s a reasonable-sounding explanation, and even made me feel bad about eye rolling at the mom in my Facebook group. But something still didn’t sit right with me. In my neighborhood growing up, friends’ moms fed me dinner with groceries from the food bank. As a Christian, giving a stranger the shirt off my back was a moral imperative. I just couldn’t square the Golden Rule — treat others as you’d like to be treated — being replaced with the idea that you have no responsibility to your neighbor.
“I’m not sure where the idea comes from that kids younger than 3 can’t share — it’s not true,” said Andrew Coppens, a professor of education at the University of New Hampshire, who focuses on the cultural processes of learning. “A good deal of research demonstrates that kids can share by 24 months, even kids from cultural backgrounds where the hegemony of ‘mine’ reigns supreme.”
Around the world, reports abound of 18-month-olds distributing food to their siblings; breastfeeding infants offering their moms fingers, pacifiers, or the second boob to suck; and even a 3-year-old handing his little sister the last potato chip. Consider the oxygen-starved Andean village where an ethnographer handed two-and-a-half or three-year-old Víctor cookies, only to watch his face fall: there weren’t enough for everyone. After the ethnographer gave him more, Víctor distributed treats around the room and beamed with pride.
“We set certain expectations with children, and children will rise to those expectations,” Lucía Alcalá, professor of psychology at California State University, Fullerton, told me. In Mexico, she says, children are expected to be accomadido — aware of others’ needs and proactively helpful. For the most part, they are. In the Indigenous Mayan families Alcalá studies, children are expected to contribute from the time they can sit unassisted: “We don’t see the terrible 2s in these communities. There’s no such thing.”
While Klein and other American psychologists frame property ownership as the stable foundation from which kids extend themselves, many believe this is exactly why sharing is so hard. “It would be difficult to overstate how central the notion of ownership is to middle-class cultural communities,” Coppens told me. “Children have actually learned to not share because that’s what they see.”
Doucleff witnessed this with her own 3-year-old, Rosy. After learning about how Maya, Inuit, and Hadzabe people parent, she re-assessed her ideas of ownership. At a beach in San Francisco, Rosy found a truck in the sand. “The mom comes over and says, ‘That’s our truck. You can’t play with it.’ I was like, ‘Are you using this?’ ‘No, we’re not using it. But it’s ours.’” Doucleff told me, “This is what society teaches our children: ‘This is mine.’”
Learning happens in context. In one of Alcalá’s studies, Mexican Indigenous children who attended Western schooling showed that they knew the different norms, essentially: “At home we help, at school we don’t.” When people argue children can’t do something before a certain age, Alcalá responds: “At what age can you learn to ski? Well, you need to have snow nearby.”
This past September, a veteran teacher who I’ll call Martha taught a new crop of kindergartners how to count, take turns, and use the toilet. To Martha, difficulties with sharing reflect a regression in kids’ overall skills, apparent after nearly 30 years of teaching. Since the pandemic, many 5-year-olds have entered her sunny midwestern classroom still in diapers, unable to sit and listen to a story or hold a crayon.
Martha says that many of the parents she encounters have taken to heart the idea that when a child doesn’t do something, it’s because they can’t, and that pushing children beyond their limits causes harm. In response, she has seen parents lower their expectations, and expect their kids to crack milestones without help. “I want my kids to be intrinsically motivated,” Martha explained, but learning requires “modeling and teaching and reviewing and doing it over and over again.” And modeling and teaching a child to develop one skill may help them learn other ones: A recent study by Nadia Chernyak, a professor of cognitive sciences at UC Irvine, found that 2-year-olds were just as capable of sharing as 5-year-olds if they knew how to count.
In our conversation, Doucleff summed up the larger cultural implications of the sharing debate thusly: “It sounds nice to have a generous child, but is it going to help my kid get ahead in this capitalist society?” Martha sees the same question play out in her classroom. At a recent parent-teacher conference, a father asked her: “Do kids walk all over my son?” A preschool instructor had labeled the kind, considerate 4-year-old “a pushover.”
“I don’t think sharing is a skill that kids need,” one Reddit mom told me. “As adults, we really never share something. Like you would never come into my house, and I would need to share my clothes with you or my belongings with you.” She might donate her old pants to make space in her closet, but she sees generosity as having no moral value: It’s not something to encourage or praise.
The assumption that sharing is a sacrifice ignores the tremendous benefits we get from giving, validated in studies again and again. I spoke to another educator, Tiffany Gale, who runs a child-care center in West Virginia. Gale told me that rather than forcing children to share, she tries to focus on the joy that sharing can bring. Like at the Toddler Center, children in her care spend as long as they want with a toy, but when they pass it off to a waiting peer, the room applauds, celebrating. It’s empowering for kids to know, “‘I had the joy of getting to play with it, and now I’m giving you that same joy, and we can share in that joy together.’ That’s what sharing is supposed to be.”
Even Tovah Klein is skeptical of how far people have taken the no-sharing ethos. When I asked her about the Facebook swing-set conundrum, she cut me off: “Yeah, I would avoid the playground if I had a child in this era.”
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