4 Ways You Can Encourage Your Child to ‘Share’.

Children need to learn how to learn.  One of the skills they need is the ability to share.Children need to know how to share their toys, their games, their fun, their thoughts and their fears.

Why do children need to know how to share?

* Sharing is the expression of our need to connect with one another.

* Sharing allows one person’s learning and skills to be passed on to another.

* It helps a child to become less self-centered

* It fosters the need for communication

* It helps organize our thoughts and feelings and make us more aware of them

* It helps us gain insights into what we think we already know

* It helps both the person doing the sharing and the person receiving the sharing

* It helps create real and lasting bonds between people

* Our world is full of places where sharing can happen

* It is a measure of how much you care about people

Most children learn to share when they are very young, they share their toys, their food, even their bugs!

But what about the child who is not good at sharing?  the child who doesn’t really understand why he or she should get involved? How can you encourage your child to be good at sharing?

Here are some ways you might like to try.

1.  Make sure your child knows when you are sharing something, and why.

The best way to help your child learn something is to model it yourself.  If your child sees you doing something he or she will want to do the same thing.  So, think about when you share things, and why.  Do you share your food?  Do you share your time?  Do you share the shopping?

You don’t need to change the way you behave, you just need to make sure that your child knows that you are sharing something and why you are happy to share in this way.

2.  Make sure that you thank your child whenever he shares something with you.

This helps your child understand that sharing is a good thing to do, that it is something that helps people and makes them happy.

But don’t just say ‘thank you’, make sure that you let your child know why it was a good thing to do.. For instance; say things like -

“Thanks for telling me about the hockey match, i really learned a lot from you!”

or

” I really enjoyed hearing all about your new game.  Thanks for sharing with me. Know I’ll know how to play it with you.”

3.  Share things with your child and comment on how sharing helped you.

When you share something with your child, either a story, playtime, information about your day, make a point of telling your child how this act helped you.  You might say things like, ” I am glad we had this time to play together, I feel so much happier now”, or,  ” Telling you about my day has helped me realize that I did a lot today.”

4  Pass on your culture

This is such an important thing to do and it is something that lends itself to sharing.  Share your family traditions and why you participate in them, share holiday celebrations and social celebrations, share the special foods you eat and how you prepare it.

Sharing your culture is one of the easiest ways you can demonstrate the act of sharing with your child.  Sharing your culture with your child not only makes you feel good but it helps your child understand where he comes from and how he exists in the world.

Help your child develop his or her ability to share.  You wil feel good about this and your child will be developing a skill that will help him succeed in school.