There are plenty of rules we try to teach our children. Say “Please” and “Thank You”, eat your vegetables, don’t throw toys at people, no hitting, etc. But there are some rules that we need to be more conscious about teaching. Specifically, I’d like to address sharing. Obviously we want to teach our kids to be kind, and sharing their toys is the kind thing to do. But I don’t necessarily agree that I should be telling my daughter to always share.

I don’t want to teach my daughter that her wants and needs must always come second to that of others.

My daughter is 1 year old right now, so playing with others is mostly just playing alongside others. She doesn’t understand sharing or even playing with another person. Right now her focus is “That’s the toy I want to play with, so I’m going to play with it”. Essentially, this is my need and I’m going to meet it. But someday she will play with a toy and another child will come up and want to play with it too. Do I tell her she has to play with this other child just because it’s what they want? What about what she wants? This is where it’s important to help them make decisions.

Does she want to continue playing with the toy alone? That’s okay. There is nothing wrong with that, and she doesn’t have to share her toy if she doesn’t want to. But would she like to include the other child and play WITH them? Then yes, that is a good time to share.

I want to emphasize to her that sharing is about including other people, but it is HER choice.

It’s really important to me that I teach her to value her choices. I don’t want her to ever feel like her opinion is less important than anyone else’s. Someday she will become a teenager, and it breaks my heart thinking that maybe she would be peer pressured to do something she wasn’t ready for because she told herself that her opinion didn’t matter.

Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. There are years between for her to learn good decision making. But as a young child, I want her to know that her opinions matter. And we can talk about why she made that decision. So she didn’t want to share her toy. Why? She was playing with it, okay, that’s an okay reason. But on the other side of it, she needs to understand that sometimes other kids won’t share with her for the same reason, and that’s okay too. They may be young, and they may need help making decisions, but we shouldn’t take away that opportunity from them by telling them they HAVE to share. I never want my daughter to second guess her worth because she was always taught she had to put aside her wants to be polite. Being kind to others does not mean being unkind to yourself.