If You Don’t Teach Your Kid To Share You’re Kind Of A Jerk

teaching your kid to shareThere’s a post that’s been circulating my Facebook feed lately, which should have been my first sign that it was going to suck and that I shouldn’t read it. It’s called, Why I Don’t Make My Son Share, and it was incredibly popular among two groups of people on my feed, dickhead parents who post pictures of their kids being mini-dickheads, and for some reason, the childfree. (Note: I’m not equating the two. I just thought it was weird, like if Maria was circulating posts about adopting pitbulls, or if I was circulating anti-Durst propoganda.)

I read it, scoffed at it, and then completely forgot about it until I wrote about how other parents suck big ones and our lovely commenter WriterLady was like, oh, hey, did you see this navel-gazy back patting over here on this monumental piece of dickery? And then she linked the piece so I read it again and tried not to stab my eye with sharp stuff. Now it’s your turn:

There’s this one red car in particular my son really likes playing with, and the last time we went, he drove it around the entire hour and a half we were there. While most of the moms with smaller kids will shadow their kids as they play, my son is old enough now that I can sit on the sidelines and watch. From there I watched a mom whose son wanted to drive the car approach my son repeatedly, saying, “OK, now it’s time for you to give him a turn!” Of course he ignored her, and eventually she gave up. There were a million other little cars for her son to drive, including one that was almost identical. Or maybe I would have stepped in at some point.

Wow! A+. And while things sound super fun over there at the Lil’ Libertarians play date, I disagree with this point of view just because as a parent, I’ve frequented a lot of the hellscapes described above, and there’s always one little d-bag in training ruining it for everyone.

Those kids are also, in my experience and without exception, the ones that will snatch your kid’s stuff away while mom is busy doing LITERALLY ANYTHING ELSE but watching them.

Basically the “don’t teach your kids to be pinko commie doormats” comes from a very adult point of view which is “you wouldn’t want to share your phone, would you?” because I guess our phones are the equivalent of little kid’s toys. To which I say, first of all; no one wants to share my phone because it’s a Windows Phone and not a real phone, and also no, I don’t want to share it which is why it stays in my pocket or sweating against my face.

Now, if I were to toss it into a sand pit where people were playing volleyball and walk away, I guess I assume people would pick it up and check it out, much like children.

The problem with this author’s shitty analogy and bitter worldview is this: the car she was talking about didn’t even belong to her kid. She just encouraged him to hoard it. I assume she’s also that dickhole buying 18 gallons of milk the second it starts to sprinkle outside. The kind of person that would probably punch octogenarians in the face on Black Friday for an $19 dollar stand mixer. A real treat.

The other problem I have is the assumption that children are rational humans, when everyone knows they are emotional blobs of tears and uncontrollable feels, not unlike sad, smelly robots. If I tell you to back the fuck up off my phone, you do because you understand this is acceptable. If you tell a kid, they cry because they don’t understand anything except that shovel is blue and I love shovels especially blue shovels can I have that give me that I need that.

You don’t have to teach your kid to share. I make my kid keep her favorite shit at home just so she doesn’t have to share them. But at least own it. When some other kid is all sad that your kid won’t let them have a turn with the only copy of Don’t Let The Pigeon Drive The Bus at the public library, at least have the balls to be like; “Sorry, sucker. Got mines, fuck yall’s” instead of sitting there drafting your searing tweet about how other parents got it wrong by teaching their kids how to meet the minimum baseline of human decency.

Also don’t ever yell at me for not writing thank you notes again.

(Image: ESTUDI M6/Shutterstock)

Similar Posts