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How do atoms with 4 valence electrons stabilize? Do they gain or lose 4 electrons?

This might be a bit of a stupid question, but I'm not sure and I can't find anything online.

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The very best example for a 4-valence atom can be taken as the Carbon atom. Such atoms do cannot hold down 4 extra electrons since the effective nuclear charge would be too weak to keep the electrons in the valence shell and the electron-electron repulsion would result in such product to be highly unstable. Also, taking away or losing 4 electrons from it is also too difficult as it needs a lot of energy that makes it impossible to exist in nature.

So, how do carbon form atoms like $\ce{CH4}$, $\ce{CO2}$?
Well, they don't form ionic bonds like metal-halogens for the reasons I mentioned above. They instead form what is called a covalent bond. In these types of bonding, the atoms don't really give or take electron, but instead share their electrons to fulfill their valency.

If you want to know deeper, the electrons exist in orbitals of the atoms and in covalent bonding, the orbitals of different atoms overlaps to fill themselves. This is called hybridization.

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    $\begingroup$ For future reference: for the body of questions, answers, and comments, chemistry.se offers to use mhchem as a comfortable method to add chemical equations and report numerical values (\pu{}) including a non-breakable space. $\endgroup$
    – Buttonwood
    Commented Apr 15 at 15:52

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