When Kids Refuse to Share

It's totally normal, but some strategies may help.

Dear Is My Kid the Asshole,

My preschooler might be the worst of the worst when it comes to sharing. He refuses to share toys with his little brother, even if he’s not even playing with them. Playdates often devolve into fights over toys, too. I’m worried he’s going to lose friends because he’s such a Scrooge! Is My Kid the Asshole?

Yours,

Help!

Dear Help!,

I’m going to cut straight to the chase here: No, your kid is not the asshole. According to a national survey conducted by Zero To Three, 71 percent of parents expect their kids to be able to share well by the age of 3. Ha! I mean, yes, some kids willingly share at this age — but many don’t master sharing until they are much older. When I asked Nadia Chernyak, a psychologist who studies the development of social behavior at the University of California, Irvine, she told me that kids are usually between the ages of six to eight when they “can be expected to both understand how to share fairly and reliably do so across a lot of contexts.”

Sharing a teddy bear with a friend might sound easy to you, but it requires some pretty serious emotional skills. When handing over a beloved toy, a child has to be able to manage his feelings of sadness and jealousy at handing the toy over, and he has to also be able to inhibit his burning desire to grab the toy back afterwards. This requires higher-order self-regulatory and inhibitory skills — processes overseen by the frontal lobe of the brain, which doesn’t fully develop until the age of 25. Research shows that preschool kids learn to help others and cooperate much sooner than they learn to share.

These emotional challenges help to explain why, even when kids are able to grasp on some level that they should share, and even when they might actually want to share, they’re still unable to do it. In a small 2019 study, education researchers Joan F. Goodman and Maya Rabinowitz posed a hypothetical question to pre-K and kindergarten kids: Should they share some of their awesome colored blocks with friends if those friends only had terrible blocks? All the kids said yes, absolutely, they should definitely share their blocks. But when these same kids were later put to the test, all were like, hahaha, nope! and refused to share. As Chernyak explained to me, young kids have a hard time balancing their self-interested motives with their interpersonal motives. They “don't always know how to think outside their own desires in a given moment,” she said.

So what should you do when your kids don’t share — and what’s the best way to encourage them to? Here are some science-backed strategies.