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Early Years (2-6)

Get Him to Share By age 4, what’s mine is all mine, right? By Lisa AlvarezPublished: May, 2006

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By age 4, what’s mine is all mine,  right? It was a big adventure:  a weekend in Los Angeles. Saturday found us stopping by the celebrated  La Brea Bakery to pick up sweet rolls and assorted baked goods to surprise  our friends. We sat outside for a few moments while my son ate  the cookie the counter person had bestowed on him following a slight  tearful  mishap. Although it keeps adults  in line, the nifty cordon draped between posts doesn’t seem to mean anything  to those who are 3 feet tall. Further, it does not hold the full weight of a  40-pound child with inclinations toward trapezing. The cookie was a success:  my son’s tears dried quickly as we viewed the city come alive from the  vantage point of the sidewalk bench. My young son watched as a man pedaled a bicycle  up to a parking meter and locked it with a chain. I had already reviewed the  logic of parking meters, though he  seemed skeptical of my social contract explanation: Drivers “pay” the  meters so they can park and the money goes to keep the road nice. La Brea Boulevard, dusty, pot-holed and roughly patched, defied that civics fairy tale. I anticipated revisiting government and social studies, and soon, and so began composing the lecture on a little 3X5 card in my mind. Meanwhile, I had to explain the bike,  the lock and the chain. I was short and  to the point: The man locks his bike so that no one will come  and take it. “But why,” wondered my son, “would someone do that?” There  it was, that innocence that still makes me wince. And here I was trying to explain the world once again – how it works and also how it, so very  often, does not. If you have sat on that bench with a child, if you  have struggled to start at the beginning of a very long story, then  you know exactly what I  told him. Since  then, I have thought of that moment as we continue to explain the concepts of personal and public property, ownership, borrowing and sharing to  him. Big concepts for a nearly 4-year-old, but what “concept” isn’t  at that age? To understand what it means to share, our son needs  to know what it is to own. And what it is to steal. And how sharing isn’t stealing even though it  might feel like that sometimes, especially when somebody wants to share your  stuff, say, your remote control snake. I tried the Socratic method. “What  is sharing?” I asked him. His answer  was quick: “Waiting.” I didn’t see that one coming  but, well, yes it is waiting. Sharing is a lot of waiting. Waiting your turn  to borrow. Waiting as someone borrows what  is yours, or what belongs to everybody. Sharing is knowing that you can borrow.  It is knowing that you can share and that what is yours will, after its temporary  change of hands, become yours again,  if also, again, temporarily. There’s trust in that, and there is the concept  of time, too, I thought to myself, just in case the abstractions weren’t  complicated enough. No, that La Brea bike owner didn’t exercise much trust, and rightly so.  People often confuse other people’s stuff for their own. They don’t  play by the rules. I needed some examples of successful sharing, of  when the trust system works.  I reminded both of us about the public library, where I’ve had to remind  my son that we aren’t buying, only borrowing, the books, CDs and videos  we check out every week. The library shares with us and everyone else. Another  example is the neighborhood park, with its swings that often are outnumbered  by the children who wish to pump their legs. At the park, we wait to share  what is not exactly ours and yet, of course, is ours. Here I think  of those parking  meters, those taxes, those bonds that fund such playgrounds. But it is one thing  to “share” library books or park swings and it  is another to share what is clearly yours and yours alone, like that remote  control snake. That requires more than waiting – it requires the development  of trust and compassion. It is, indeed, one of those very long stories that  we tell  our children over and over again.m Lisa Alvarez, an English professor at Irvine  Valley College, lives in Modjeska Canyon with her husband and 4-year-old.

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