“I’m trying to teach my toddler to share but he is very resistant to giving up anything. What can I do?”

As a parent, you will of course encourage your child to share, but you also must realize that sharing is an advanced moral and social skill for a tod­dler because it requires self-sacrifice. Self-sacrifice is not a resident virtue within the nature of toddlers. It is not that your child doesn’t share on occasion, but rather he can­not just turn off his sense of “me, myself and I” and instantly become ‘other-oriented’.

Two-year-olds are more inclined to self-play than they are cooperative play. For example, if you place three two-year-olds in the same room with similar toys, their natural inclination is to self-focus to the point of turning their backs to the other children and play by themselves. Very lit­tle social interaction is going to take place except when one child desires a toy that another is playing with and the first child attempts a ‘hostile takeover’.

The type of socialized play, where there is the give-and-take of sharing, usually begins between age three and four and rarely before. Right now the best thing you can do is to continue to encourage sharing the way you are, but accept the fact that it will be a while before a moral sense of sharing-and-sacrifice begins to have intrin­sic value and meaning to your toddler.