Sharing and Taking Turns

An article has been going around Facebook lately about adult-enforced sharing, which is what most of us teach to little kids.  "Leif has a toy you want?  Okay, I'll set the timer for two minutes, and then you can have the truck."  The article points out that this isn't the way the real world works; that we adults can't walk into a room where someone is working on a brand-new iPad and say "I like that, so it's going to be my turn in 5 minutes, so finish up!"  She says that in her parent-led preschool, they even keep toys reserved for children when they have to pause to go potty or something like that.  The child can keep the toy as long as he is interested, and no one else gets an enforced "turn."  Many of my friends have liked this turn-around of turn-taking, but I have a lot to add to the idea. 

Obviously, bringing together three independently playing children and expecting them to be together and play together 24 hours a day with a limited supply of toys, is an adventure in figuring out sharing rules.  Have two of those children being dramatic, bossy, leader types, and mama's got to work out some rules really quickly!   So we have rules, and they're firm rules, but they're pretty simple and hands-off.

I originally had some more ideas in mind, including more ownership of specific toys, both permanent and temporary (like an individual basket).  But it turns out the only things that really belong to someone are workbooks and coloring books, which get used up.  They each have their own dolly, and they can ask for their own one back, but they haven't been too picky if they see someone else with it, and sometimes dollies end up in the bottom of the box for days on end.  The more breakable or many-piece toys are on the "ask mama" shelf -- which is difficult enough to remember -- so I only let things like legos down when they're feeling pretty calm anyway.  They've gotten a few little things, like toys from school or in gift baskets, that are precious mostly to the owner, and naturally and projects that the child has made.  Other than that, they don't really care about having their "own" things.  However, it has really helped having plenty of everything.  So they don't each have their "own" blocks or farm animals or toy food, but there's enough of them to go around. 

Basically the above principle of "turns" -- or rather, NO turns -- is the only one that we've really used.  Which is, basically, if a child is playing with something, then he is playing with that something, until he decides something else... whether that's abandoning the toy, inviting someone else to join the game, giving it to someone else who asks -- or he keeps it the whole day long.  That's it.  If someone starts a game with a toy, they have ownership of that game, and the other children can become involved, or not.

There's a few reasons for this, and I can draw on different philosophies in my life for this.  (Or I can just point out that it makes kids fight less.  Why would you ever go to the potty if someone else could get your toy while you're gone?  Fighting less is a good reason for just about anything around here right now.  As is avoiding potty accidents, for that matter.)

From the Reggio-Emilia/Pistoia philosophy, I have respect for a child's work and their own ability to self-direct.  For a child, their play is their primary work.  Children are so eager to copy us, and it's wonderful and sweet when they copy sweeping the floor and soaping up their tummies, but it's valuable to give them time to be the leaders.  This is another big reason why I'm not a sit-on-the-floor-and-play-together kind of mom, and I'm a terrible designing-cute-crafts kind of mom.  To let them truly lead and direct their own work, I've got to stay out of it.  That doesn't mean doing nothing, but it means not doing the same work.  

For instance, for the last hour or so the kids have been doing an activity of folding and cutting out flowers and butterflies, and I've been writing on the ipad at the same table.  They got the idea out of a craft book, and I helped them with the original instructions and then drawing the pattern on the folded paper, so they could be successful.  The craft book had specific paper to use and a specific scene to fill in with the completed flowers, but I ignored that part and got the book out of the way!  The kids used white paper, so then they wanted to color their flowers.  Then we talked about putting the flowers in a garden, and we thought about butterflies, so I helped them make folded-paper butterflies.  When Hibiscus started to cry because her butterfly didn't look like a butterfly, I drew on a little face and feet and patterns on the wings, but I didn't actually tell them what to do or how to color it to make it "look like" a butterfly.  I was trying to give her exactly the amount of support she needed to feel successful enough to stay engaged, without taking over her imagination.  Each of the kids needs different amounts of support in order to take off on their own, and then to keep soaring.  I had thought of giving them green paper to paste their creations onto, like a meadow, but luckily it took me a little while to find the colored paper and Emerson is used to being self-directed, so he told me to get white paper, and he drew on soil, grass, flower stalks, and a nice yellow sun.  Hibiscus followed suit.  The Reggio-Emilia/Pistoians believe that children imitating other children is natural, and they will naturally imitate back and forth all around and collectively come up with more ideas.  Whereas imitating an adult will just teach them to imitate, since there isn't the natural back-and-forth, and children will end up disappointed with their work because they can't make it look just like the adult's project..  So I didn't make any flowers or butterflies, but I could talk with them about what they were doing , fix problems or admire as necessary, but I was obviously engaged in my own work which was no competition for theirs.

It's the same thing with imaginative play.  For instance, I have seen all of them playing a little bit with baby dolls, and I like to see this nurturing, role-playing game, but I believe I can encourage the play in a more fulfilling way from a little distance.  I could get out a dolly and sit on the floor and rock it, and almost certainly someone would come over and start rocking their dolly too.  I could say "let's feed our babies!" and my child would say "okay! what shall we feed them?"  I would immediately think of the toy food, and go over and get out a wooden banana and we could both feed our babies wooden bananas until someone got bored of wooden bananas, and looked up at me to see what we could do next for our babies.  Instead, I see a child get out their baby and rock it.  "What a good mama you are!" I say.  "You are being so gentle and loving with your baby."  (Which gives them an example of gentle and loving, which are concepts we're working on, but that comes from their own choices.)  The child is proud and wants to rock the baby even more, but perhaps starts looking a little distracted or bored.  "Is your baby waking up?" I ask.  "Maybe she's hungry."  The child is happy to mime the baby doing something new, but asks "I don't know, what should I feed her?"  I hand the question back, saying "what does she like to eat?"  The child runs off, and several minutes later comes back with a basket, different colored duplos and a wand for stirring.  "I'm makin' soup," I am told, and the next half hour turns into a joyful exploration of making soup.  I am participating in the game, but only from the edges.  The child can't copy what I'm doing, and I never would have thought of making soup out of duplos!

So obviously, if we truly believe in our child's ownership of their own play, then we don't tell them which toys they can use and when by enforcing turn-taking.  I actually see this inspiring more creativity and back-and-forth mutual imitation.  For instance, this morning Emerson pulled the curtains over the easy chair in a corner to make a "housie."  He didn't want to share his housie with anyone, and asked me to make sure no one went in his housie while he was in the bathroom and gathering more supplies.  Hibiscus watched sulkily for a few minutes and argued that she wanted to go in the housie, which was getting more fascinating by the minute, but I pretty much ignored her.  Buttercup wandered over, not really truly understanding, and Emerson squealed "she's getting into the electrical stuff! take her out, that's really dangerous!"  I was already on my way, and I picked her up and said "that's Emerson's housie, you can play over here."  I put her on a cushion, which she started bouncing on, in pleasantly distractible 2-year-old fashion.  By then, Hibiscus started pulling the opposite curtain over the other corner of the room to make her own housie, and she wanted Buttercup in her housie.  Pretty soon, it worked out that all the couch pillows laid across the room connecting the housies, in varying piles, and they were bouncing back and forth in complicated patterns to go and visit each other.  The game went on, with all of them happily and deeply engaged, for at least half an hour.

What would have happened if I'd told Emerson that three children could fit in his housie, or that he had to let Hibiscus have a turn after three minutes?  Well, first of all, he would have started feeling upset and defensive, and probably his budding creative ideas would have been squashed under that negativity.  But he certainly would have had no impetus to start gathering "electrical stuff" to put in a housie he was about to give up, and the game would have lost that addition (they regularly make little forts with the curtains and chairs, but this time it became much more complex).  And if Hibiscus had gotten the house, she would have felt proud of getting something her brother wanted, but she wouldn't have had much plan of what to do with it.  Probably the house game would have ended with her "turn."

Which leads me to my own big reason for no "turns," from no philosophy whatsoever, just an exploration of my own values.  When my husband and I talked about what we wanted to pass on to our children, and what sort of adults we wanted them to become, the ability to focus and mentally dive into a project or problem was one of our top values.  On one hand, I think being a successful adult takes a certain amount of dedication and concentration -- and my husband and I are both musicians, which takes an extremely high amount of willingness to concentrate on something with no immediate reward, but the same could be said for other disciplines as well.  But equally importantly, I take such joy in really diving into something and focusing on it, for hours at a time, or in a different way for months or years.  I want my children to have that gift.

This came back in my mind first working with the orphanage children.  Whatever natural capacity they had for becoming truly engaged in work or play had been overwhelmed by emotional crisis, having to do adult's work, sickness and hunger, and having too many children around to ever be able to do anything.  But even so, the children's powerful desire, both to learn and to engage themselves in play and creativity, was amazing to me.  It seemed so clear that children just need to be given the capacity to explore and learn, and their inborn need guides them in what they need to do to grow up.

For orphanage children or cherished ones, play is actually amazingly complex.  The child seen an object and thinks of something to do with it, and as he holds it and manipulates it he thinks of other ideas of things to do.  He does the same actions over and over again, until they gradually turn into a new exploration.  As he becomes more focused and then expands his range of play, he usually needs both small and gross motor coordination; he often talks about what he's doing, giving him practice not just verbally, but mentally of leading the conversation.  If other people are around, they might become intrigued by the actions that he is doing; a child might come over and start imitating and adding her own ideas, or an adult might ask him questions or define his action, both of which use social and linguistic skills.  All these things are true whether a baby is banging a rattle on the floor, or a toddler starts putting things in and out of a box and dumping it over, or a child who starts building a complex castle and inventing lives for everyone in it.  However, that older child is also getting a chance to take over the powerful mommy/daddy role, experiment with gender roles, working through emotional difficulties, re-living events to fix them in her memory, practicing adult skills, experimenting with math and science skills in the real world, and focusing on whatever is important to him at that moment.  Isn't it amazing?  But it takes a long time of gradually making the play more complex, thinking of additional questions or ideas or additions, before the child is really truly engaged in any of those deeper issues.  

We all know that whatever the other child has is the most wonderful toy in the house!  I remember hosting a playdate when Emerson was two or so, when I was in constant amazement over how everything that the boys fought over, they chose to focus on things we had multiples of anyways.  It wasn't the big amazing fire engine, it was one of the dozen matchbox cars, or one of five balls, three of which were identical.  But when someone else is playing with it, THAT one looks so interesting!  I notice the same thing with older children, except a little more complex.  If someone's "into" a game and the other child isn't doing much, that game looks way better than the nothing, and the obvious thing to do seems to be to take the toy, and thus all the fun of playing will be MINE!!!!  Except the second child hasn't put the mental energy into it, so they don't actually have very much to do.  There are exceptions, when both children have amazing ideas about a particular prop which they want to use in different ways.  But usually, what happens is that one child is gradually creating a whole scenario using certain props.  The other child gets jealous and wants a turn, but if the adult enforces the switch, the other child imitates a little bit of what he saw, or does something obvious like drive a car back and forth for a few minutes, but without the mental engagement rarely makes it into real play.  So the focus and benefits of the first child getting into genuine play and building skills are lost, in order to have an artificial fairness and the second child not feeling jealous for a few minutes.  

The Waldorf method teachs than young children learn by example -- not that they learn by different things including watching us, but that everything they are learning, they are learning by following what we do.  So how do I actually share and take turns?  I'll think of a thing that I genuinely want and so does someone else, like sharing the one household computer with my husband.  Do we set a timer and trade it back and forth every five minutes, or twenty minutes?  Certainly not!  That would drive me crazy!  First of all, there's some logical sharing going on: I use it when he's not around, and he does when I'm out.  Secondly, we usually talk about it, but basically let the other person use it until they're done or come to a break.  We ask questions like "how long are you going to be?" or describe a specific, finite task and ask if we can use it for that moment, or if something urgent we explain that too.  

If I think of children following our model, that seems reasonable.  And the main element in our adult sharing seems to be discussion -- with each other, not a ruling third party.  Children can do this.  In my observation, they are often incredibly willing to hand over their precious toys, if they are simply asked respectfully, or they see a reason to do so.  This happened during the art activity, when Buttercup had the pair of child scissors and was snipping randomly at a little piece of paper.  Hibiscus saw her activity as rather useless, and what's more it was paused, so she grabbed the scissors for her flower.  Buttercup screamed and snatched the scissors away.  I suggested that Hibiscus ask her politely, and as soon as she said "Buttercup, please will you me scissors, hmm?" Buttercup examined the scissors thoughtfully, and passed them over.  

Which brings me to another point about sharing.  Some parents regulate toys because they know that children won't have everything they want in life, and they want them to learn to compromise and share.  I feel confident that they are getting plenty of practice dividing up things that are practical to share, without interrupting the importance of their genuine work.  We do a lot of sharing of food, when it makes sense to buy one portion and divide it into three child-sized bits, whether it's for economical reasons or because they only need a child-sized treat.  We only had one proper pair of child scissors, and one kind of chintzy pair we got at market, so they had to pass those back and forth -- including trading back and forth once there were only two of them cutting.  But scissors are a practical thing to share, and it wasn't a central or an emotional part of the activity.  They share more abstract things, too; chores are accomplished mutually, special activities happen together, they pass the jam at breakfast and help each other spread.  That's all learning to share.

And they all share the same small space, and most importantly, they have to share ME.  I'm more important to them than any toy or game, and they have to negotiate how everyone can snuggle and touch me while we read books at bedtime, and I can't sit next to everyone at dinner, and who holds what hand when we're walking.  And they're constantly hearing "wait your turn" or "I'll be there in a minute, I'm helping your sister go potty" or "I can't leave the stove right now" or "it's not your turn to talk, I'm listening to your brother."  Being one of three children is just naturally a life of sharing!  

Which is one of the things that gives me great joy after raising an only child for so long.  But even that long-time only child has adjusted pretty smoothly, given how few months it has been (or weeks, depending on how you are counting!), and given that the siblings arrived with a full set of demands and grabby hands, and superior strength.  He can see that everyone needs their teeth brushed and their plate served, and that I only have two hands and arms for holding and snuggling.  That's logical, but why should anyone else go in the housie he just built?

So, since I only do have two hands and arms and they must compromise on getting the perfect snuggle, at least I can provide them with the chance to do their work and play without interruption or division.  I think it actually significantly decreases fighting and competition, although they have to suffer through a few moments of wishing for something they don't have.  All three children have moments of wanting something that looks fun, but they also have moments of having their precious toy defended and handed back to them, and I think that second one is more powerful.  The older ones understand the system, and rarely even protest when I remind them that someone else is using it right now.  The vast majority of the time, the jealous child gets out something similar and starts a parallel game, and the child with the precious toy ends up including them to make the game more fun -- or the other child gets out the same supplies and they play the same game, like with making the flowers and butterflies.  Sometimes they do discuss and negotiate taking turns or a switchover.  The rest of the time, the second child wasn't really that interested, and ends up going to play outside or something.

As I write this, Buttercup went and got out a paper fan Hibiscus had made earlier and was fanning herself with it, when Hibiscus noticed and wanted it back.  It was Hibiscus's creation, so I had Buttercup give it to her.  Buttercup screamed.  Hibiscus fanned herself and said "I'm cold, I'm hot, I'm cold, I'm hot" playfully, and I suggested to Buttercup that she say "sister, can I please use it?" which she promptly stopped crying in order to lisp out.  Hibiscus wasn't really that interested in fanning herself, and she liked being asked, so she gave it back, repeating her favorite words a few times to herself.  A few minutes later, Hibiscus wanted the scissors, so she asked politely as she grabbed them out of Buttercup's hand without waiting for a response.  Buttercup screamed again, which I interpreted for Hibiscus that she didn't want to give up the scissors.  We looked together for the other pair of scissors, and once Hibiscus had them, Buttercup recovered enough to say "sis-ah dis one.  Me dis one." So I defended individual property, and gave enough examples for the children to negotiate between themselves.  Now I hear Hibiscus using my words, "sister, can I please use it?" calmly to Buttercup, and Buttercup, when not being attacked, can manage "mpa, mpa, ta na na na, lindako, lindako."  ("give me, give me, ta na na na na, wait, wait,") which is going from demanding words, nonsense, into the words that I use.  I repeated the words to Hibiscus, who has a really hard time respecting her baby sister's space, but complied.

This is all happening at the end of quiet time.  They are back at the table with pencils and scissors, folding paper, except this time they have all kinds of new idea about what they want me to draw and they cut out, like giant flowers and girls and boys and buckets.  The somewhat directed activity this morning has turned into total creativity.  I'm still here, facilitating polite conversation and drawing the half-shapes on folded paper.  So I'm helping them be successful, but they are entirely directed by their own imaginations and concentration.  And as usual, their child imaginations are much more fruitful than what me or an activity book could have come up with!  I would never have thought of cutting out paper people, making a family, and then cutting out paper buckets for them to carry around!  And the two of them, working independently but nearby, came up with more than either of them would have thought of on their own.  Emerson thought of cutting out non-flowers, and Hibiscus thought of doing people, and Emerson started doing buckets, and now HIbiscus wants to do basins big enough to fit the people in for their baths, and Emerson did a hand-washing bowl.  I love watching them!

So, basically, I try to stay out of their play except when I can help support them, or when they become frustrated.  I praise what I like to see and help them find words for what they're trying to express.  I ask questions that can give them ideas for where to go next, but that remain open-ended so they stay in control of their own play.  I respect that their lives are full of rules and requirements, and that their play is entirely their own.  I don't tell them how to play, and I don't tell them how to use their toys or that they must include people who aren't naturally part of the game yet.  In return, I see them playing with increasing creativity and concentration, and naturally including each other as they make their play more complex and thoughtful.  That's a lot of what I DON'T do insofar as sharing and taking turns -- I don't do much of anything!  They play, and I remind them to let each other play in peace.

Oh, and I also come over and help open the scissors when Buttercup decides to experiment with cutting her own finger off.  That's another time a parent comes in handy!

EEMerson's picture, and then Hibiscus';s butterflies and flowers.