Teach Your Child to Play Sports
Anyone with a competitive child knows these types: a boy who challenges every referee call, a parent who throws insults from the outside, a girl who can hardly bring herself to shake hands after her team has lost. Sports and play are very important for the development of children: they learn teamwork, strategy, patience and get coaching. But things go awry when kids can’t balance victory and defeat from the proper point of view – when defeat is devastating and victory is cause for obscene gloating.
Teaching children to be athletic is not an easy task: if you value sports, games and competition, you want children to care about their best play and whether they win or lose – but you don’t want they were emotionally suppressed every time. once the other team of babies has an unexpectedly strong game. Fortunately, the good parents of the Slate’s Mom and Dad Are Fighting podcast spoke up about this in the context of a discussion about whether you should let your kids win at games. Here’s what you can do:
Consider the age of the child
Essentially, they point out, teaching good sportsmanship is about teaching good manners, and good manners in games and sports will benefit their friendships and relationships in the long term. However, young children can find it difficult to win and lose (in fact, adults can find it difficult to win and lose), and some parenting guidance – or even a parent’s thumb on the scale – can be a valuable tool.
First, take into account the age of the child and the game you are playing. If your child is five years old and you teach her chess, you are not going to destroy her play by play, you are going to instruct her about the consequences of each move. If you’re playing hockey with a seven-year-old, you’re not going to waste Gretzky on his frail ass – you’ll teach him a little pass and assist and give him the chance to land multiple times. shots too. It’s the same with family games: When I play Sleeping Queens with my kids, I remind my four-year-old to remember the position of the queens on the board. When we play Go Fish, I remind my seven year old son to remember what I just asked for when it was my turn. And there is another element in this – we choose games in which children can sometimes win by pure chance. (Uno was recommended by parents in Slate, just like Jenga-Jenga, because young children can have fun with older siblings and adults, because the goal of the game is not to win or lose, but to scream Jenga! When the tower falls. )
Remind them that failures are temporary.
Psychologist Eileen Kennedy-Moore, writing for Psychology Today , offers great advice for parents looking to exercise well. First, she says, encourage them to compete with themselves – trying to break their own track running or breath-holding records. Second, include a few co-op games on your list so they can just play with other people without worrying about winning and losing. She recommends Harvest Time (for children 3-7 years old); my family like Hanabi for older kids.
But the most important piece of advice she offers is that the outcome, whether you win or lose, will be temporary. The feeling of rubbish is temporary, and the feeling of victory is temporary; as she points out to her clients, “it makes more sense to focus on the game — play well, try hard, and enjoy the sport he enjoys — than the short end result.”
These tips: Compete with yourself, enjoy collaborating with others, and learn to cope with temporary discomfort are all components of self-control, self-motivation, and resilience that add up to “resilience.” (With the big and obvious caveat that “perseverance,” as Paul Tough explained in Atlantic , is more of a non-traumatic parenting and balanced parenting factor than anything else. Children living in peaceful conditions are more likely to cope. competitive play is better than that of children in chaotic, violent, or careless families.)
Now, some of this is out of our control: neither parent wants to raise a child in chaos, or conflicts with the other parent may arise due to competition in the child’s life. But as far as you can, play with restraint and instruction, choose games that they can sometimes win, and remind them that the thrill of victory / sting of defeat will go away pretty quickly.
Clear? Now, according to your estimates, get ready, go ahead !