How to teach your kids to share, lessons form the Aka

In my last post, I wrote about how conflict between my children over physical objects (sometimes literally over an interesting piece of trash) is the hardest part of my parenting experience at the moment. I have tried turn-taking, timers, and every other parenting hack under the sun. I bought some sand timers to help them set time limits around sharing and then they fought over the sand timers. Nothing seems to work and inevitably it sucks up all of my time and energy. 

I am fascinated by how traditional hunter-gatherer societies deal with this issue, since they are notoriously good sharers. Children in many hunter-gatherer societies are known to start giving gifts as young as age three. Given that this does not seem to be a child’s natural tendency, how do others convince them to share? 

I’ve done a bit of research and here’s what I’ve found. I hate to break it to you, but this isn’t something you can implement overnight. It’s not a hack or a quick trick. It’s about culture and changing your own relationship with things and people. 

Here’s what it boils down to: do you love people or do you love things? Do you value relationships or do you value objects? In our society, our love of objects often supersedes our love of people. Children see this, and it affects them. 

In one of the most fascinating ethnographic accounts I have ever read, Barry Hewlett and Jennifer Roulette compare the attitudes of Aka children, a hunter gatherer tribe in the Congo, and Ngandu farmers living in the same region. Both live in the same geographic location and interact regularly, but they have distinct cultures and it influences the attitudes of children. By Western standards the Ngandu could hardly be considered materialistic, but they do place higher cultural value on objects and economic trade than the Aka, whereas the Aka place the highest value on human relationships. As a result, the Aka hunter-gatherer toddlers are more likely to have conflict over being in close proximity with older children, whereas the Ngandu toddlers are more likely to have conflicts with older children over competition for objects. The researchers attribute this to early acquisition and manifestations of cultural values: emotional proximity to others among the Aka and economic-material dimension of social relations among the Ngandu. 

Like I said, it’s not an overnight fix. We live in a culture obsessed with physical objects and we are not about to change it overnight. However, we can try to do better within our homes. Recognizing the impact this has on my children, I am trying to make adjustments to my own behavior. Like so many others in our culture, I buy things to compensate for emotional gaps in my life, rather than out of necessity. I am trying to curb this behavior. I am also trying to be better at sharing what I consider to be “my” objects. Often we justify not sharing on the basis of safety or cleanliness, but what kind of message does this send? In Aka culture, if an infant wants to play with a machete, she is allowed to do so. That’s how strong the culture of sharing is. It’s simply not acceptable to prevent someone from using or taking something they need or are interested in, even an infant. This is radical and most Western parents are not willing to accept it, but I ask, if we are not willing to share what we have with our children, how can we expect them to share with one another? Often I hear this interpreted the other way around. We say, “you would not expect an adult to give up their iphone just because someone else wants it. We should not expect the same from children.” That makes sense to us, but what if it’s backwards? What if the right thing to do is to give up our iphone to someone else who wants it at that moment, and to expect our children to do the same? 

Aside from adjusting our own behavior (which I believe to be the most powerful factor) there are a few tactics that the Aka use to actively encourage sharing among children:

1. Give children explicit opportunities to share. One Aka girl’s earliest memory is of her mother giving her a bowl of food to share with others. In Western culture, we often do the sharing for the children. We buy a box of candy and then we divide the candies between the children so that there is no fighting. In Aka culture, the parent will give the box of candy to a child and then instruct the child to share. This doesn’t always work. In the example above, this particular Aka girl recalls that she was very hungry and did not want to share. She ate the entire bowl herself. Her mother called her stingy and others teased her and she started to cry. This brings us to the next tactic. 

2. Public shaming is more powerful than discipline. If an Aka child does not share, no one intervenes. Western parents will tend to swoop in and right the wrong. We tell the child to share right now or we will take the object away. We tell them to give it back or they get a timeout. Among the Aka, there is no discipline, only disapproval. Group members will make sounds, gestures or comments to shame the child’s behavior. This can be a powerful deterrent, as described above. 

3. Tell stories about the consequences of not sharing. In Aka culture, children hear stories about how people who do not share properly face sanctions. These are not the sugary, fairy-land stories we tell children in the West. People who do not share may die, starve, lose a loved one, or be turned into a monster. 

As I said, many of these solutions are not possible in the Western context, and many people will find them to be controversial and undesirable. Personally, I am at the end of my rope with sharing arbitration, so I am willing to try anything. Why not try something that has stood the test of time for many, many generations in a culture where sharing is the central value?