Counting skills help develop ‘fair sharing’ in young children

YOUNG children who are good with numbers are more likely to be generous and share their belongings with friends, according to a study.

Researchers from Harvard University and other leading US universities found counting skills were the single biggest predictor of “fair sharing behaviour” among three- to five-year-olds.

Prompting children to count also made them more generous, the experts found, and children with improving maths skills also simultaneously became more generous. Academics gave children a set of sharing tasks where they had to dish out stickers to themselves and another person.

Two studies on more than 300 threeto five-year-olds investigated the relationship between sharing behaviours and counting, cognitive control and working memory.

Sharing behaviours and counting were found to be closely linked, and among children who had not yet learnt to count an intervention to help with counting, such as counting on animal cards, made them more likely to share.

Giving children linguistic prompts to help with numeracy also improved a child’s generosity, the study found, adding further proof to the theory that maths skills helps children share.

The findings suggest one of the reasons some youngsters struggle to share is because they are still learning to count.

Study author Dr Nadia Chernyak from the University of California said: “This is the first research to investigate whether symbolic counting exerts a causal impact on sharing behaviour.

“We reasoned that children who do not share fairly would benefit from the modelling of proper counting behaviours thereby providing them with a behavioural tool that would facilitate fair sharing.”

The findings were published in the journal