By Matt Harrington, BCBA · Behaviorist Book Club · April 2026 · 12 min read

Teaching Sharing to Learners with Autism: Evidence-Based ABA Strategies

Overview & Clinical Significance

Sharing is among the most socially valued skills in childhood, yet for learners with autism spectrum disorder, it poses significant challenges that go well beyond simple willfulness or behavioral noncompliance. Effective sharing requires a learner to voluntarily reduce their own access to a preferred item or activity in exchange for a social consequence — peer approval, reciprocal sharing, or inclusion in a group activity. When the social consequence is not yet a conditioned reinforcer, the behavioral economics of sharing simply do not support it: giving up access to a preferred item produces no net reinforcement.

This is the core clinical insight that shapes ABA approaches to sharing instruction. Before sharing can be taught as a behavior, the social consequences of sharing must be established as reinforcers through pairing and conditioning procedures. Without this foundational work, sharing programs produce only surface-level compliance that does not generalize or maintain, because the natural contingencies in the social environment are insufficient to reinforce the behavior.

The learning objectives of this course operationalize the developmental prerequisites for sharing, the evidence-based instructional procedures for teaching the behavior chain, and the generalization programming necessary for sharing to emerge naturally across settings and peers. For BCBAs, the course provides both a conceptual framework and practical procedures for what is often an under-systematized goal in ABA programming.

Sharing is also relevant to the broader social skills curriculum because it is a context in which multiple complex operants interact: mands (requesting a turn), tacts (commenting on shared activities), intraverbals (conversational reciprocity), and social listener behaviors all emerge in sharing contexts. A sharing program that is well-designed addresses not just the motor act of giving an item but the broader verbal behavior and social engagement repertoire that makes sharing a meaningful social interaction.

Background & Context

The behavioral literature on social skills teaching for learners with autism spans several decades, with sharing-specific research emerging as part of the broader social skills and play skills literature. Early research established that simply placing autistic learners in proximity to peers did not produce spontaneous sharing behavior, and that explicit behavioral instruction was necessary to develop the skills that neurotypical children acquire through more informal social learning processes.

A critical insight from this research tradition is that the prerequisite skills for sharing must be carefully assessed and, where necessary, directly taught before sharing instruction begins. These prerequisites include: attending to a partner's actions, tolerating the absence of preferred items without engaging in problem behavior, responding to simple social bids, and having at least rudimentary mand and tact repertoires that allow for the verbal behaviors sharing contexts naturally evoke.

Motivating operations are central to understanding the behavioral economics of sharing. When access to a preferred item is freely available, the motivation to share it is low. When access is restricted and the social consequence of sharing is established as a conditioned reinforcer, the behavioral equation changes: sharing produces continued access to the activity (through a turn structure) and social reinforcement. ABA approaches to sharing systematically establish these MO conditions as part of the instructional design.

The verbal behavior literature, particularly Skinner's analysis of social operants, provides a framework for understanding the verbal dimensions of sharing. When a learner shares with a peer and receives verbal acknowledgment, that social stimulus functions as a conditioned reinforcer only to the degree that it has been paired with primary reinforcement in the learner's history. For learners whose social environment has not established peer verbal behavior as reinforcing, explicit conditioning procedures must precede sharing instruction.

Clinical Implications

The clinical implications of sharing instruction begin with prerequisite skill assessment. Before writing a sharing goal, the behavior analyst should probe the learner's current repertoire for: tolerance of item removal (can the learner release a preferred item without problem behavior?), response to simple social bids (does the learner orient to and respond to partner initiations?), waiting skills (can the learner tolerate a brief delay before re-accessing the item?), and at least rudimentary mand behavior (can the learner request a turn or the item in some functional way?).

Items selected for initial sharing instruction should be moderately preferred, not highly preferred. Teaching sharing with a maximally preferred item maximizes the establishing operation against sharing and minimizes the chance of success. Moderately preferred items provide enough motivation to engage but not so much that releasing the item produces significant frustration. As the learner acquires the sharing behavior chain, instruction can be extended to increasingly preferred items.

The sharing behavior chain should be task-analyzed and taught step by step: (1) engaging with the item, (2) responding to the partner's request or cue, (3) releasing the item to the partner, (4) waiting while the partner uses the item, and (5) receiving the item back. Each step is taught with appropriate prompting and reinforcement, with prompt fading proceeding as the learner demonstrates consistent independent responding at each link.

Group-based sharing instruction, in which the learner practices sharing with peers in naturally occurring group activities, provides the richest training context. Naturalistic play groups, structured game activities, and social skills groups all offer sharing opportunities that can be arranged and reinforced by the behavior analyst or trained staff. These contexts are preferable to one-on-one sharing instruction with a therapist because they produce behavior conditioned to naturally occurring social stimuli rather than to the presence of a specific therapist.

Ethical Considerations

Code 2.01 of the BACB Ethics Code requires that sharing programs be based on individualized assessment and evidence-based procedures rather than behavioral folklore about what sharing should look like developmentally. The pace of instruction, the items used, the partners involved, and the natural context for practice must all be calibrated to the individual learner's current repertoire, not to age-normative expectations that may not reflect the learner's behavioral developmental level.

Code 4.07 on restrictive procedures is relevant when sharing instruction involves extinction of problem behavior that occurs during item removal. If a learner engages in challenging behavior when required to release a preferred item — a response that may have a substantial reinforcement history — the behavior analyst must conduct a functional behavior assessment and develop a behavior intervention plan before implementing extinction. Treating problem behavior during sharing instruction as expected and proceeding without a BIP is an ethical error.

Assent from the learner should be sought at the appropriate level. Sharing involves requiring a learner to give up access to a preferred item, which is an aversive condition for some learners. While sharing is a clinically important goal, practitioners must be thoughtful about the pace of instruction and the demands imposed, particularly for learners who find item removal significantly distressing. A graduated approach that increases demands as tolerance develops is both clinically and ethically preferable to rapid progress that produces chronic distress.

Code 3.01 on individualized assessment ensures that sharing goals are written in terms of the specific behavioral repertoire to be developed for the individual learner, not as generic social skills goals that lack behavioral specificity. Sharing goals should specify the items, partners, settings, and behavioral indicators that define mastery — including both the sharing behavior itself and the absence of problem behavior during the sharing exchange.

Assessment & Decision-Making

Prerequisite skill assessment for sharing should be structured and systematic. A useful protocol includes: (1) probing item release — place a preferred item with the learner and attempt removal after brief access, recording the learner's response; (2) probing peer orientation — observe whether the learner spontaneously attends to a nearby peer engaging with the same type of item; (3) probing mand behavior — observe whether the learner makes any request for an item that another person is holding; and (4) probing waiting — assess the learner's maximum tolerable wait interval before problem behavior occurs.

The results of this assessment determine the starting point for instruction. A learner who cannot tolerate any item removal without significant problem behavior requires a waiting and tolerating program before sharing instruction begins. A learner who can tolerate removal but never attends to peers requires peer orientation training. A learner who attends to peers and tolerates removal but has no mand for items needs mand training before sharing instruction is meaningful.

Progress monitoring for sharing programs should track behavior at the level of the task analysis (which steps are mastered, emerging, or absent), the occurrence of problem behavior during sharing exchanges, the number and type of partners with whom sharing has been probed, and the frequency of spontaneous sharing — sharing that occurs without clinician prompting in naturalistic contexts. The last measure is the most clinically meaningful because it indicates that sharing has come under the control of natural social stimuli rather than only therapist prompts.

Decision rules for expanding sharing instruction should be specified in the program. A common framework is: advance to a new partner after mastery with the current partner across three sessions, advance to a new item category after mastery with the current item, and begin reducing prompt level after two consecutive sessions at 90% or above accuracy.

What This Means for Your Practice

Sharing programs benefit from being embedded in the full context of the learner's social skills curriculum rather than treated as an isolated goal. A learner who is also making progress in peer engagement, joint attention, and mand training will find sharing instruction more accessible because they are simultaneously developing the social motivators and communication skills that make sharing behaviorally viable.

Collaboration with caregivers is essential for sharing generalization. Caregivers who understand the behavioral prerequisites for sharing — and who know how to arrange the MO conditions and prompt sharing opportunities at home — extend the learning that occurs in clinical sessions into the environments where sharing matters most. Parent training should be specific: demonstrate the sharing routine, practice it with the caregiver, identify two or three daily opportunities where the caregiver will implement it, and follow up on implementation.

For behavior analysts working with learners in school or community settings, peer-mediated sharing instruction is worth the investment. Training typically developing peers to prompt and reinforce sharing — and to understand that the autistic learner may need more support before they can share spontaneously — creates natural training contexts that produce more robust generalization than therapist-mediated instruction alone. Peer training is a documented evidence-based practice for social skills development in autism and is directly applicable to sharing instruction.

Data-driven decision-making is especially important for sharing goals because the behavior can masquerade as mastered — the learner completes sharing exchanges in training contexts — while never becoming spontaneous or generalized. Regular naturalistic probes, in which the learner is observed in unstructured social settings without clinician prompting, are the only way to determine whether sharing has become a truly functional social behavior. These probes should be built into the program design from the start and reviewed at every treatment plan update.