About a week ago, Miranda was playing with our foot stool and Eleanor came over as well. Miranda tends to scratch her nails along the top of the stool. Eleanor likes to beat it with both her hands. As it turns out, Eleanor found that Miranda was in her way, and quite deliberately grabbed Miranda’s arm and moved her out of the way. Miranda lost her balance and got upset. I was a bit shocked–I have no expectation that Eleanor knows anything about sharing, but I also didn’t expect her to consider Miranda and obstacle and attempt to move her away.
Confronted with this situation, I didn’t know what to do. At this age, I have no meaningful way to communicate anything to Eleanor. In fact, she was beaming at me. I tried moving her away from the foot stool for a bit, but she came right back and moved Miranda away again. I tried moving her arm off of the foot stool every time she did it to Miranda, but while Eleanor knew she was getting upset, I had no confidence that she understood the Golden Rule. I ended up taking a video of the interaction to ask Agnes about it later, and then I moved Eleanor to the other end of the room where I gave her a different set of toys.
[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (2.79 MB).]
When I showed it to Agnes, she didn’t have any other suggestions for what we should do. We decided that distracting Eleanor with something else was probably the best course of action at this age. Anyone have other suggestions?
yes, at this age, they don’t understand the concept of sharing (and will not for a while until about 2 if you’re lucky). i also found that the best is to give the second child another toy to play with. i also started explaining to the child the need to share with words and action. i know they may not understand but one day they will. all the things i didn’t want lucas to do (like biting, hitting, etc), i would say “NO” loudly and sternly and physically take him away from what he is doing. he got it eventually.