Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Trade as a Solution for Bickering Toddlers
Trade as a Solution for Bickering Toddlers
Mar 17, 2025 4:09 AM

If you’ve raised multiple children, you’ve dealt with sibling bickering, particularly if said children are close in age. With a three-year-old boy and a two-year-old girl, both just 13 months apart, our family has suddenly reached a stage where sibling play can be eitherwholly endearing or down-right frightening. Alas, just as quickly as human love learns to bubble up and reach out, human sin seeks to stifle and disrupt it. If that’s too heavy for you, “kids will be kids.”

The areas of contention vary, but most of es down to that age-old challenge of sharing, or, as others might frame it, the classic economic problem of scarcity. There is only one fire truck, one soccer ball, andone Buzz Lightyear, even when, in reality, there may betwo or three or four. If Toddler X wants to play with Toy Z, no matter how many alluring gizmos and gadgets sit idly by, Toddler Y will all of a sudden long for Toy Z as well. Did I mention the Fall of Man?

My wife and I have done our best to teach proper behavior, maintain order, wield discipline accordingly,and love and hug and encourage along the way. When es to sharing, it’s no different. We promote generosity, emphasize patience, teach to inquire politely about the prospects of “collaborative consumption,” seize items when peace is rendered impossible, enforce property rights and ownership where fair and applicable, and so on.

Yet, as any parent knows, toddlerhood is characteristically suited to making a mockery of one’s parenting philosophy, whatever it may be. Just when you think you’ve trained your child to sit quietly when silence is appropriate — teaching manners, establishing authority, setting boundaries, padding the circumstances with (sugary) incentives, etc. — junior will kindly decide that he’d rather forget about all that and shout something about lavatories or Dad’s big bald head.

In response to such circumstances, parents innovate, and innovate we have. As keen as we are on the social and spiritual value of learning to share, we have learned there are additional values to be instilled through a different solution: trade.

Having a particular fascination with the beauty of trade, I probably should have thought of it sooner. Far better parents surely have, for the rules are rather simple. If sister has a toy that brother wants, and his polite requests are countered with a polite refusal, as soon as the frustration begins to brim, we will calmly suggest a trade. Pointing to one of sister’s highly modities — her favorite stuffed animal, “Chuckie,” is the routine go-to — we will attempt to prompt a path to peace.But Chuckie is often not enough, and duly embracing the reality of subjective value, brother will often need to gather multiple stuffed animals to close the deal. Eventually, sister will e filled with so much desire to cuddle her “friends” that she will offer up the asset.

All transactions must, of course, be voluntary. If there is no mutual benefit to be found, no value to be created, the deal dies, leading each party to wrestle with the consequences. This, too, we’ve found to be a healthy process, and often far less frustrating for the child than being met with a simple “no!” If the terms are violated, however, and the barbaric human impulse wins the day, we proceed to invade Toddler Utopia with the needed referee governance.

Overall, it has proven quite effective, now reaching a point where trade is routinely used without our knowledge or prompting. It is not mon to overhear such transactions taking place multiple times a day, with oddly varied “offers” accumulating in piles around the house. It isn’t the only method by which they’re learning to co-steward their resources, but it’s proven a powerful potion for peace.

Adam Smith

Indeed, as Adam Smith famously argues in the Wealth of Nations, trade has had a significant civilizing effect on humanity, prodding the self to at least appeal to the self-love of someone else. In his latest book, economist Peter Boettke surveys these effects, noting that trade “created incentives for individuals to interact through persuasion via mutual benefit, rather than through zero- or negative-sum games of force or deception,” and that through such collaboration and spontaneous order, trade created not only “more civilized relationships among individuals,” but “more civilized social orders.”

But alas, outside of the occasional peace it brings to our family and whatever forms of social and spiritual capital may be gained in the process (patience, self-control, trust), the broader takeaway is rather limited at the level of a toddler, a stage in life where self-love is excessively amplified. When my kids seek to trade x for y, it is largely driven by the caricaturedimpulses of blind ole’ economic man. They are creating value through mutually beneficial exchange— hurray! — but as much as their father would prefer to place halos here and there, it is first and foremost about their own happiness and utility.

In turn, a system of free trade serves us well in offering a baseline that manages human depravity and leverages human nature in productive ways. With the right constraints, things are bound to get better and fuller and deeper as humans grow and mature andtrade. But such a framework in and by itself, pursued as robotic materialistic calculators, makes for quite the lackluster philosophy of life, not to mention a highly problematic theology of work and service. As economist Jennifer Roback Morse observes in her book, Love and Economics, beginning with a striking discussion of how parents sacrificially relate to their helpless, needy babies, “self-interest, even rational self-interest, is not enough to provide the social glue for the good society.”

The question, then, is to where do we leap from this starting point? Basic trade brings peace, order, cooperation, and collaboration, and these features bring their own hearty benefits, as my wife and I will duly attest. But such benefits are not to be squandered by elevating them as ultimate ends.

Each interaction and act of value creation brings with it an opportunity, a chance to render the position of our hearts further toward service and away from the self. This is a lesson that adults need just as much, if not more, than toddlers. Our work plays a large part in putting food on our tables, but to make dinner possible, we must create value in the life of another. How we approach that activity, either as petty utilitarian toil or earnest sacrificial worship, will impact everything: the way we submit our heart to God and neighbor, the way we order our lives, and in turn, the far-reaching dynamics of the free and virtuous society.

Although some parents may take issue with our occasional divergence from the more typical “sharing” boilerplate, in utilizing trade, we are but leveraging another powerful form of giving and receiving, one that needn’t be cast aside as a road to myopic selfishness, but rather, embraced as a beginning to active and effective service.

[product sku=”1103″]

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Book Review: My Grandfather’s Son
Perhaps the most striking theme of Associate Justice Clarence Thomas’s autobiography My Grandfather’s Son is just how many obstacles Thomas had to e to reach the high judicial position he currently holds. Thomas was born into poverty, abandoned by his father, and was raised in the segregated South all before achieving the American Dream. At the same time, it was Thomas’s poverty-stricken circumstances that would help propel him to a world of greater opportunity. Because of his mother’s poverty, when...
Conservative/Libertarian Books for the Acton Reader
It is the new year and the time of reflection is upon us. In 2008, we witnessed a revolutionary left-liberal presidential victory and the onset of substantial economic challenges. Under the circumstances, I thought now might be a good time to propose a list of outstanding books for the intellectually curious friend or fellow traveler. I would not dare attempt to put these in order based on excellence. Just consider it a series of number ones. 1. Lancelot by Walker...
One Good Thing about Term Limits
I’m ambivalent about the value of term limits, but one thing that can certainly be counted in their favor is that they (at some point at least), force lawmakers to go out and try to make a living in the economic environment which they helped to shape. In Michigan, nearly half of the 110-member House of Representatives will consist of new members. Of the 46 new members, 44 ing from seats that were open because of term limits. And now...
Summing Up a Great Man’s Life
Richard John Neuhaus is dead. We’ve lost some big ones in the last year. Many of you will not realize how big this one was. I pray Jody Bottum and some of the others in the First Things (Neuhaus’ hugely influential journal) world can carry on his legacy. Though Neuhaus’ death leaves a chasm to be filled, I think Dr. Bottum is the right man for it. Anthony Sacramone is a former managing editor of First Things. He is also...
Farewell, Father Neuhaus
First Things has announced that Father Richard John Neuhaus died this morning. I am hardly qualified to write a eulogy, having never met the man. No doubt others, including one or two Acton colleagues who knew him better, will perform this service admirably. But I pelled to offer a few words, as I have long admired Fr. Neuhaus and his vital work, in particular the journal he edited for many years, First Things (FT). In the mid-1990s, I was a...
Movie Review: Valkyrie
The year is 1943 and Valkyrie, the second release under the revamped United Artists brand, opens with German officer Claus von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise) on assignment in Africa. He had been sent there because his opposition to Hitler and the Nazi regime had e dangerously explicit and bellicose. His promotion to lieutenant-colonel of the general staff and transfer from the European lines to Africa is intended to give him some protection from pro-Nazi officers who might make trouble for him....
Remembering Father Richard John Neuhaus
For those concerned with a vigorous intellectual engagement of the religious idea with the secular culture, these past 12 months have been a difficult period. On February 28, 2008, William F. Buckley, Jr. the intellectual godfather of the conservative movement in America, died. Only last month, Avery Cardinal Dulles, SJ, passed away at 90 years old. Cardinal Dulles was one of the Catholic Church’s most prominent theologians, a thinker of great subtlety, and a descendent from a veritable American Brahmin...
Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor and the ‘Death’ of Capitalism
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster and President of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, has touched off a row over remarks he made recently concerning the demise of capitalism. Here’s the context from the Daily Telegraph, a British newspaper: [the Cardinal] made the astonishing claim at a lavish fund-raising dinner at Claridges which secured pledges of hundreds of thousands of pounds for the catholic church. The Cardinal, dressed in his full clerical regalia, said in...
Ignorance, Humility, and Economics
I like Robert Samuelson’s recent column about the difficulty (impossibility?) of accurately analyzing economic reality, let alone predicting its future. Over the past several months a few people, mistaking me for someone who knows a great deal about economics, have asked what I think about the financial crisis, the stock market, the recession, etc. My response is usually something along the lines of the following: Anyone who pretends to know and pletely the causes of the economic meltdown and/or how...
Acton Commentary: A Second Opinion on Employer Responsibility for Heath Care
Health care reform is likely to move back into the public eye as a new Congress and a new Obama administration prepare to start work this month. In this week’s Acton Commentary, Dr. Don Condit argues for a move away from employer funded health care benefits to a portable system. “Corporate human resources departments should not be viewed as the main source of support for Americans’ health care,” he writes. “The iniquitous government subsidy for employer-based health care could be...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved