It turns out that science may have figured out how parents can help their preschooler learn to share with others. Teaching is difficult, especially when it comes to young children, and there are a lot of lessons to teach. Parents want to teach their young children to be kind, to be empathetic, and to share with others.
Sharing is one of the main learning lessons for toddlers, and preschoolers, but it can be difficult to teach it. It is difficult because very young children are not inclined to share. They don’t want to. They find a toy they like, and they want it all to themselves, but the world knows that it is not very fair.
According to Medical Xpress, a study that aimed to look at a young child’s sense of morality may have given insights into how to help preschoolers learn to share with others. This study was done by Duke University, and it can be read in full here.
It all comes down to the idea of everything being “fair,” and children may not have an extensive idea of what fair really means. To a preschooler, fair means that every one goes to bed at the same time, and they don’t take age or anything else into account.
As children grow, they start to understand that fair is about a lot more than everything getting the same thing, and that there are factors at play that help determine what is fair for everyone. While most children do not have this sense until they are about 8, there is something that can help them get there faster, and that is disagreement.
This seems like it wouldn’t work, but the study showed that a quick conversation between a preschooler and someone who disagrees with them may go a long way to helping them learn what is fair.
Researchers stated that they have already known that interactions with other people can shape how they grow, and how they learn about the world. In this study, researchers asked 129 children between the ages of 4 and 5 years old to talk about simple moral dilemmas with a puppet, and they asked them to try and come to most fair decision. No matter what the child picked when it came to a solution, the puppet disagreed with them, and they asked the child to explain their reasoning. They found that depending on what the puppet did, the children would respond differently in the next scenario. Which means that it helped shape their view on what fair really means, and this can help their sharing.
Sources: Medical Xpress, Science Direct