Go read the Disclaimer again. I am not a doctor. This is not medical advice. Seriously.
Small children want what they want when they want it. Sometimes, they want things that don't belong to them. Sometimes, they want things that someone else is using. This can create problems which range from trivial, through inconvenient, to catastrophic.
I live in a capitalist society which takes private property quite seriously. I tend to treat property in the home as owned communally by the family, which some exceptions (R.'s cell phone, for example, is not communal property; the kids do not get to mess with it). We locked up the stuff we really did not want the children messing with (we still have fencing around the TV and so forth). We have enough resources to get enough Stuff that we can usually produce a duplicate or compelling distraction when there is competition for something (this is why we own two iPads). Nevertheless, T. had to learn a couple basic ideas when he was very young, despite being generally non-verbal: It's Broken (which sometimes included batteries dead, if there were no replacements available) and Not Ours. I'm not saying there weren't any tears. I'll further add that there were homes and places we didn't go back to, because it was too stressful. But it worked fairly well.
Once we had two kids, particularly when the younger was grabbing and especially after she was mobile and grabbing, just not going there was no longer an option. The preschool where our son received services spent a lot of time and effort on turn taking, which was generally successful. And while we had two of a lot of things (if not more -- there are no fewer than 6 PotatoHeads in this house), we don't (and never intend to) have two of everything (for one thing, two rebounders in a room near each other just sounds like asking for trouble).
Thus we find ourselves refereeing between an autistic boy and a girl with an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis, who are both verbal to a very, very limited to degree. Fortunately, our daughter's temperament is extremely calm and happy; she tolerated having things taken away from her very well, especially if accompanied by a Not For Babies.
We say, So-and-So is playing with that a lot. We say it in exactly the same way, and we follow it up with physical enforcement. I don't mean we hit or spank or anything like that -- just that we're bigger than they are, and we'll block them, hold their arms, pick them up and remove them from the area, whatever it takes to enforce the So-and-So is playing with that rule.
When we are around someone else's stuff, we're sticking with the Not Ours rule. The biggest problem that arises here is exactly the problem that a friend of mine mentioned when asking me about sharing. Many parents will try to get the Have to turn over the Desirable Object to the Have Not. I discourage this if at all possible for two important reasons, both of are directly related to my children's diagnoses:
We have a long-standing exception with our next-door neighbor (who we Love Love Love), partly because our neighbors are very committed to their children learning to play with children like mine, and, in general, to sharing; in some ways, our neighbors have become an extension of our family in a way that even the extended family is not, and certainly children met at the playground are not. My son's turn-taking skills are adequate to playing with them; and my daughter is quite easy going about giving things up that she takes inappropriately; the neighbor kids are amazingly verbal and polite about asking before taking.
Several problems arise with this approach. The biggest is that the Make the Have Turn it Over strategy is very, very popular. I'm not sure why. I suspect the goal is to reinforce to the child that the child does not own or control anything; everything is contingent on What the Adults Say. The argument often presented is very different: Children Must Learn to Share, which might be admirable, but my understanding of human nature suggests that this is exactly the wrong way to encourage a child to want to share. Also, I am troubled by the idea that grabbier kids get more time with the good stuff. Whatever the meaning of the tactic or the reasons given, discussing the meaning or reason with other parents is a dangerous activity. Someone will be offended.
A friend has the strategy of putting the burden more on the Have Not: "The other child is playing with that right now. You may play with it when they are finished. What can we find for you to play with now?" In a context (family, public toys such as at a playground, library, preschool, etc.) where both children have a comparable claim to play with the item in question, this institutes turn taking, which is how these kinds of conflicts will be resolved in school and other institutional settings. It's tough, however, for very small children to wait. There is also some risk that the Have Not will have to leave before the Have is done playing with it. Turn taking tends to work best when there is some external enforcement of time limits; it doesn't have to be particularly organized. In practice, this is usually what happens on swingsets at playgrounds when they are busy.
The primary difference between our So-and-So is playing with that and my friend's version is that my friend is promising something in the future (you can play with it later) and negotiating in the present. These are miraculously effective strategies with children whose language and development enable them to understand things like "the future". We rely on them less because of our particular circumstances. In particular, describing the future (even if certain) to a child who does not understand the difference between the future and the present is a recipe for emotional breakdown.
My default stance with respect to my children is that I try to make what they want possible. I do this in such a thoroughgoing way that many people are alarmed to contemplate the future: will my children be able to comply with any structure, any rules? Will they survive school? Can they stay out of jail? I am, therefore, quite surprised to realize how hardline I am with respect to Other People's Things, compared to parenting styles I encounter at playgrounds and elsewhere. (For the record, I'm even more hardline when it comes to children pushing, shoving, hitting, etc.) I suspect that, like my attitude towards safety, the scarcity of the rules I choose to have makes the ones that I do have all the more important to enforce. Other parenting strategies surely work differently.
Copyright 2011 by Rebecca Allen
Created January 6, 2011 Updated January 7, 2011