Joanna Fortune: My four-year-old doesn't want to share her toys 

Children often need gentle coaching around developing social skills, and sharing isn’t as straightforward as is often thought, but she is still very young, and you have a school year to prepare her for primary school.

Our four-year-old daughter is spending a second year at playschool so she can develop stronger social skills. She’s an only child and finds it difficult to take turns or share her toys. We’ve spoken to her about the need to be kind and patient, but she doesn’t seem to be interested. What can we do?

It’s good for children to have their two years of pre-school (ECCE programme) to help prepare them for primary school. The most important sign of readiness is that they have developed the level of social skills, emotional expression and independence around basic tasks. Your daughter is still just four years old, so this second year of pre-school is appropriate for her developmentally.

Her only-child status may be more ‘correlation over causation’ when it comes to her struggles. Many solo-children can turn-take and share, and many sibling-children will struggle just as you describe.

Simply being four years old could explain much of the difficulty you describe. It is typical for children this age to struggle with sharing and turn-taking merely because they are still acquiring the capacity for empathy, reciprocity, perspective-taking, critical thinking and self-awareness. These are skills which are nurtured and developed within the context of a relationship, so you can focus and work on them at home.

Playful ways to encourage sharing include:

• Play games that involve taking turns and name aloud, “My turn, your turn, now my turn again”;
• When you have something (such as a chocolate bar), you can offer her a some and say, “I like sharing with you, sharing feels good”, or “when we share, we both get to enjoy this”;
• Slowly introduce more challenging situations, for example, a dice roll game such as Snakes and Ladders, where players quickly switch from winning to losing, and deal with disappointment. You could also add in that rolling a particular number means skipping your turn, as this will push her to tolerate frustration, follow rules, and focus on the other person in the game;
• Do ‘small world play’ with little toys, playing out scenarios. Having the little characters talk to each other means playfully shifting perspectives and considering situations from another point of view.

Don’t force her to share, as this serves to entrench feelings of resentment. Instead, say something to her like “I know you will give me a turn when you are finished”, and perhaps remind her about this if she persists with adding after a while, “I’m still waiting for my turn, and it’s hard to wait this long”.

You can also build this practice when playing with her by saying aloud, “When you share, it feels nice to play together, but when you don’t, I feel like playing with someone else”, so she is hearing patterns of cause and effect around sharing. Don’t overstate or labour the point too much — simple repetition and practice around this will help her to integrate the message.

Children often need gentle coaching around developing social skills, and sharing isn’t as straightforward as is often thought, but she is still very young, and you have a school year to prepare her for primary school.

• If you have a question for child psychotherapist Dr Joanna Fortune, please send it to [e-mail]