Howard Trio Plus One: Life Lessons with Triplets: Sharing is Not Always Worth the Battle

Trying to teach triplet two-year-olds to share is an uphill battle. Since they don't fully understand the concept of sharing, I am really just dealing with the aftermath from taking a toy from a toddler. There is crying. Lots of tears. And screaming. And although one child is happy because he or she now has the prized toy, there are one or two others that are throwing a fit. When sharing is absolutely necessary, I use the timer on my phone to make it "fair," but honestly it doesn't help much since it seems so unfair to the two-year-olds. So, although I know it is very important for children to learn to share, sometimes it is simply not worth it for me since I deal with sharing issues all day long.

There are certain things in life that triplets must share, such as their mommy. Today in music class I had a lot of "triplet mom guilt" as all three wanted to sit on my lap and they weren't very happy sharing my lap with each other. All of the other children in the class were there with one or two caregivers, and no siblings, and of course those children were mostly content participating in class and they didn't really care about sitting on a lap. But Alexis, Jack, and Faith almost never have their mommy or daddy to themselves, and some days that is really hard for them to handle.

For the most part, we make sure the kids have three of everything and that those items are assigned by color whenever possible. This cuts down on a lot of fights, which keeps me sane. But last fall I bought the kids one small train set from Ikea thinking that would be sufficient, but I was wrong. There are simply not enough pieces in that train set to share, so we weren't able to play with it for months. For Christmas, Micah's parents bought the kids a couple of more train sets to supplement the original set, but that didn't solve the sharing problem since the kids wanted all of the train pieces to themselves and they would hog the tracks. So when I went to Target today I bought three small plastic bins, I put an initial on each bin, I divided the tracks equally, and I assigned each child a train color. This solved the problem! Tonight Alexis, Jack, and Faith happily played with the tracks and trains from their own bin. Plus, they really seemed to enjoy putting away their personal train set at the end of the night since they had special bins. Triplet mommy win!!