NoGuPoMo: Not Every Culture Forces their Kids to Share

The end of NaNoWriMo is nigh for sure....whilst I finish my novel off (yeah, I know I'm fooling no one...) I'm delighted to share this week's guest post from Mama Mzungu, aka Kim, an expat who left the US to live in Kenya. You can find out more about her story over on her blog. I'll leave you to read her great cultural post about sharing…..I would love to hear what you think about this - I found out that I'm parenting Kenyan style…..

"Mo-oommm...  But it's not fair!!!" whines every pre-schooler from Fresno to Philadelphia.

"Well, sorry dear, life is not always fair."  replies every harried mother, settling the issue at least in her mind.

Asking children to share is cultural
Photo Credit: Anissa Thompson

But the thing is, despite their proclamations, American parents work tremendously hard to try and make life as fair as possible for children.  They break up fights and force apologies.  They enforce the "take turns" policy.  They repeatedly implore their little charges to "share nicely," and they dole out consequences when someone is being too selfish. They ask "who had it first?"

I suppose this would be my modus operandi as well.  Though with only one kid there were less opportunities to enforce this system of fairness.  And by the time I went from having one child requiring entertainment to two children requiring a referee, I had been living in Kenya for the better part of two years, where such a regime of benign rights-based interventions does not so much exist.  So, I've, somewhat subconsciously, adopted the Kenyan system, which is this: Everyone defers to the noisiest (generally youngest) child.

When we first moved to Kenya and Caleb ran around with a mixed-aged group of friends, I observed this in practice.  Caleb and another child would want the same toy, and Rukia (his care giver) would almost always ask the other kid to give Caleb the toy.

It made me cringe.  I assumed she forced the other children to give him the toys because well... the toys were his... and I somewhere I suppose I feared that she deferred to his whims because he was the lone mzungu child.  When this happened I would always intervene, telling Caleb his friends were "guests" and we needed to give them a turn with the toy too. I'd force him to give the other child the toy.

This invariably resulted in a full scale temper tantrum.  After being told by Rukia that he could have the toy, I'd undo that, making it worse.  Everyone would stop and stare at his meltdown, and my lesson in sharing and being a good host would get drowned out by the screaming. I was left feeling like I did something wrong, but had at least imparted an important lesson that I hoped would eventually sink in.  I had restored life to a more "fair" balance, even if I created more chaos.

But my reaction was out of step with the culture.  For Kenyans, it seemed that preventing the chaos was what was most important. The child who is the least able to weather the disappointment of losing a toy, the one who is least capable of understanding mine/yours/who had it first, basically the youngest, is the one who wins. Because when he wins there's less noise for everyone.

Kenyans, by asking children to put others before themselves learn, not that they have rights, but that they have a responsibility to keeping the peace for the group.

What I had failed to realize was that Caleb was getting his way because he was the youngest child in his group of playmates.  When a child younger than Caleb entered his group of friends, even he was asked to defer to the littlest playmate.

To Americans, this probably seems supremely unfair, but it's really just a different set of rules and, amazingly, the older kids simply learn to sublimate their own needs.  And that's probably not such a bad thing to learn how to do.

Now that Emmet has grown to the age in which he has toy preferences, a strong will, and an impressive

set of lungs, we've asked Caleb to generally defer to the baby.  I know that this is VERY much against American sibling rivalry advise, which says that if you don't want the older child to resent the baby, you can't always let the baby win.  But so far - and probably because the culture reinforces this different set of rules - Caleb is with the program.

The problem is that we are currently back in the US, where babies are expected to understand, or at least play along, with the take turns/who had it first policy.  Forgetting for a moment where I was, I recently asked Emmet's cousin to give up a toy Emmet was crying for.  His mom, carefully reminded me that her son had been playing with it first.

And that's when it hit me:  Here in the US we really do see each child, and even baby, as having particular individual rights. When those rights are violated we work to restore order and fairness.  We hope that our children learn to share, but they certainly learn that some justice is owed them.  Kenyans, by asking children to put others before themselves learn, not that they have rights, but that they have a responsibility to keeping the peace for the group.

I don't think one way is necessarily better than the other, but, like all parenting practices, they make sense given their context.  But, I have to say, having experienced both, the Kenyan way is definitely less noisy.