I'm Raising A Loser And Why You Should Too
When I heard the quote above on the radio, I smiled and nodded the topic of winning and losing is pretty big in my household. I didn't give much thought to sports or competition prior to having my little one because I am not a big fan of sports. My husband, on the other hand, has spent most of his life doing some sport or the other and credits sports with making him the person he is today while I have spent most of my life with my nose in a book. I have to admit that it took me a little while and some research to get where he is. Turns he is right and the research bears him out.
When children are deprived of the opportunity to lose, they are robbed of the biggest lesson they need to succeed in life: how to get up from defeat. The repercussion of coddling our children and preventing them from losing are long-lasting. For instance, New York Times columnist, Frank Bruni, described how children in New York are literally breaking down because they cannot handle the new requirements of the Common Core. A social worker in the article claimed that children were throwing up and having suicidal thoughts. Bruni made what I think is a great point that perhaps it's not the Common Core that is the problem:
- If children are unraveling to this extent, it’s a grave problem. But before we beat a hasty retreat from potentially crucial education reforms, we need to ask ourselves how much panic is trickling down to kids from their parents and whether we’re paying the price of having insulated kids from blows to their egos and from the realization that not everyone’s a winner in every activity on every day.
There are sports teams and leagues in which no kid is allowed too much more playing time than another and in which excessive victory margins are outlawed. Losing is looked upon as pure trauma, to be doled out gingerly. After one Texas high school football team beat another last month by a lopsided score of 91-0, the parent of a losing player filed a formal complaint of bullying against the winning team’s coach.
It used to be that trophies went to victors; now, in many leagues, they go to everybody — for participation. Some teams no longer have one or two captains, elected by the other players, but a rotating cast, so that nobody’s left out.
The fallout from not learning how to recover from failure continues into adulthood. Right now college administrators are finding that they have to manage the parents of Millennials because the parents of their students continue with their helicopter parenting even though their children are away at college. Parents reportedly call professors to complain about their child's grade or college administrators about issues their now adult children should be handling on their own. Unfortunately, it continues out into workforce with business leaders worrying that Millennials are not ready for work. It doesn't have to be this way, however, because we can let them lose like Michael Jordan.
Yardyspice