Teaching Young Kids to Set Healthy Boundaries: a Focus on Sharing

If you spend any time at all in the modern parenting world, there is a verb you will hear over and over, usually attached to a little child’s name.

“We SHARE our toys, Brianna.”

“Finn, please share one of your trains with that little girl.”

“You need to share, Joe.”

On the surface, this seems simple enough. I mean, sharing is a nice, lovely thing to teach our children.

Right?

I don’t know.

I mean, how would you feel if, every day as you were sitting down to lunch, your boss stopped by and said, “Sarah, you need to share that sandwich with your co-workers.” Or “Jerome, please share that bowl of noodles with Kevin. Look how sad he is that he doesn’t have any.”

That would be weird. And annoying.

So this idea that we pound into our children to share, share, share is a little unsettling.

It’s unsettling because we are giving our children a very strong directive without any context whatsoever. We’re failing to give them internal decision making skills related to when to share, how much to share, and what to do when it doesn’t feel safe to share, etc.

Instead, we’re giving them the blanket notion that if they don’t want to share, it makes them bad.

This can have so many outcomes, many of which we perhaps never intended:

· Adults who have a hard time saying no to others.

· Children who rebel and don’t want to share anything.

· Endless amounts of guilt around whether we are doing enough in and for the world.

· The inability of teens and young adults and adults to say no in sexual relationships.

My intent is not to be reductionist in this area. I know that the above issues have many causes. But what we teach our children about sharing does play a role.

As a parent of three young kids, I’m still learning as I go. But here are some ideas about what we can do instead of insisting that sharing is the gold standard about 500 times a day:

1. First and foremost, back up a little.

At a local play space we frequent, it is not uncommon to see five kids playing at a train table and then at least two parents hovering over the table, narrating their child’s every move (“Caleb, we share our trains with the other kids.” “Samantha, move over to give that boy some space.” “No, Mason, that’s not yours.” blah blah blah.)

Two things about this:

a) This type of behavior can make kids incredibly anxious. To understand this, simply imagine someone hovering over your shoulder and talking to you like that all the time.

b) When we stand back and let kids negotiate something like a train table themselves, they actually really do figure it out most of the time. When left to their own devices, children naturally learn to navigate the world as it exists for so many adults.

They learn how to handle it when others don’t share (e.g., children will often walk away and find something else to do), how to ask for things from other people, and how to decide when and with whom they want to share. For most kids, when left uninterrupted, these things are no big deal and help build some great decision making and boundary setting skills.

So perhaps, if we only do one thing, we can learn to give our children a little more space to figure it out on their own.

2. When we have more than one child, we can stop encouraging them to share everything with each other. Especially, again, when their natural inclination is to give everything all the time.

The other day, my child who is a natural giver was eating a sandwich. Her brother wanted some. Because I was tired and didn’t feel like listening to an argument, I said, “Come on, just share some.” She looked and me and yelled, “But I don’t want to share!”

Message received. She was eating her sandwich and I was asking her to share in order to make my life easier. Not really the best teaching on my part.

We can also respect this instinct in younger, pre-verbal children when they don’t want to share. Instead of teaching them that they are bad for having this instinct, we can realize that very often, they are picking up on and rejecting our manic energy about why we need them to share (so other people don’t think we are bad parents, so we don’t feel awkward around our friends and their kids, etc.)

Smart kids. We really could learn from them.

3. We can talk to our children, when they are old enough to understand, about how to make decisions around sharing. We can talk to them about when they feel the urge to share and when they do not and how to manage other people’s disappointment or frustration.

We can talk to them about the importance of staying in their own lane – if Damian and his mom are having a disagreement about what he can bring to school for lunch (he wants chips, mom packs carrots), we can teach our children that it is not their business to get involved and fix that for Damian by giving him our chips. Especially when we love our chips.

Also – and this is so important – we can talk to them about what to do when it does not feel safe to share. Doing so is a key building block for so many things that keep us healthy as adults, not the least of which is maintaining healthy physical boundaries, which can help preserve our energy, prevent sexual assault, abuse, etc.

At EyesOpenIowa, we know the importance of teaching young people boundaries in sex education programs. And we know that many of you do, as well. We can help expand this beyond the classroom by talking about the concept of sharing with our kids and with our friends, in order to change the narrative around this important issue.

Gail Cowan, MSW, is EOI’s Director of Development. A former therapist, she also runs her own coaching business. Find her at www.gailcowan.com.