Hi, this is Janet Lansfrey. Welcome to Unruffled. Today I'm going to be responding to a question.

It's actually my favorite kind of question because this scenario this parent shares just has so many

angles to it. Some of them are on the surface and there's other parts to this that are

really important that are much more nuanced and easily to miss. The topic is sharing.

This parent is interested in her child's process around learning to share. Her child is only

two and a half years old.

And this is something we want for our children, right? Along with other character traits and

manners that we want to nurture in them. Now, it's often easy to think of teaching children

in this very simple way. We teach them to share by making sure they share,

maybe insisting that they share. But interestingly, this is not how children actually learn

what we really want them to learn if we think about it, which is not just how to perform certain manners,

but to develop the character, in this case, to develop a generous spirit where our child

wants to share it because they like to help somebody else feel good. And that makes them feel good.

And it's just a kind thing to do. So all of these manners, whether it's

saying please and thank you or apologizing or sharing, what we're looking for here as parents,

what's going to really teach our children to do these things when we're not looking, you know, when we're not

there making sure they do it, is that they've learned through their own experience that this

feels good, that this is a positive way to be. And they've learned that through us demonstrating

it with them, that we're generous with them in our spirit, that

we share with them when we can, that we apologize, that we make amends, that we admit when we're

wrong, that we are polite, you know, all of these things that we're not going to be perfect at.

But if we can even get that some of the time, that's where children are getting their information. That's what's going to help them to be able to perform in these ways that we want them to perform. In other words, it'll help us when we understand the way children actually learn, which is sometimes different from the

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