Learning to Share and Cooperate Leads to Friendship

Cooperation and sharing are basic life skills that enable us to make friends, work successfully in groups and get along well with others. Babies are not born knowing how to cooperate or share. This ability is learned through interactions and experiences with parents and other significant care givers. Around age three, children begin to practice real cooperation when their play requires sharing and taking turns.

Teaching children this age taught me that learning how to cooperate and share is a process. It takes time and interactions with other children to learn that sharing can be fun. All I had to do was spend a few moments listening to my children as they played to understand where they were in the process. When I resisted the urge to interfere in their “negotiations,” I found out the most. We did a lot of role playing as a class to work through issues so we could learn to “make” friends and “get along” with them.