Losing with Dignity ...How to teach kids to be a good sport!

                                                         

I am starting to see that I need to step up my writing game. My Bread Winning Mama has great insight and perspective that is drawing in lots of views which is wonderful to see. Luckily, we are a team and not competing against each other.
With it being the holidays, if your home is anything like ours, game boards and cards come out and the family will be sitting around the table.  It's a time to enjoy each others company and conversation while trying to win the game of your choice. As an adult losing is a little easier to handle but can still be tough if there are those around who are sore losers. But as a parents it is important to teach our kids the fun and not so fun sides of playing games. I know for me, I was not always the most graceful loser when it came to competition. I still have things that I battle with but it's the mentality of grow up, learn from the mistakes and move on that keeps me going. However little children are not so quick to make this decision.

To give you a quick peak into my own recent competitive experience and being on the losing end of the game.  I was really hoping to win a scholarship to help cover the cost of a conference that I am attending in February in New Orleans called Dad 2.0.  I will be stepping more into the world of blogging as a stay at home dad and learning more about marketing/social media. I am excited for the conference so I put my name into a hat with many other people to get this $500 scholarship. After I filled out the application and waited for the announcement, I started having small panic attacks about if I would get this award. Sounds dumb, right? A grown man, worrying about getting this money when I have a wife telling me, "It does not matter if you get it or not you are going." "We will make it happen it is important for your job as a SAHD." Still I was on edge and even had a couple bad nights of sleep. When the announcement came I did not get the scholarship. I was disappointed and even reacted very negatively and had to take some time to cool off, sounds stupid but it was an internal battle that stems from childhood issues (yep those come up even at age 38). So it got me thinking about how we are teaching our kids to deal with losing and how to be a good sport.

The other, I sat down with Hezekiah (age 4 will be 5 in February) and we played a simple game of Go Fish. He loves playing games! He is constantly asking if I will sit down and play them with him, but he thinks that he is going to win every time. I have witnessed this a few times prior, but I finally had a chance to work with him one on one about how to be a good loser.  We played our first two rounds and I won both instances.  Losing the first round didn't seem to bother Hezekiah but the second rendered a more animated and emotional reaction to the loss.

So we stopped to talk about how to respond. I asked him how he felt, he said "I am not happy. I did not win, it makes me sad." I told him I understood that it is not fun to lose. But after the initial reaction he needed to be able to quickly come out of the negative and tell his opponent or friend that it was a good game. After that I told him that he could ask if they would like to play the game again, but I let him know that they may not choose to play again and that their response should be respected. He could however ask if they could play again soon.  After I explained this to him I gave H the chance to practice this by going through what we just talked about.
This was our conversation after He lost back to back games.

H: Man that stinks that I lost again, but good game papa.
Me: Thanks
H: Can we play another game?
Me: Sure bud lets play one more game

The next game he won. He was so excited and told me,

H: Sorry you lost papa, do you want to play another game?
Me: No thanks. We need to move on to other things today.
H: Ok well could we play again another time?
Me: That would be good.

Now don't get me wrong it is not always going to happen this way but building a foundation of how to react appropriately is so important for how to win and lose gracefully.  Just like teaching your child how to work on complex math problems, we have to teach our kids the basics before they can move onto the more complex issues.
Last point about why this is important is that not every kid who plays a game is going to win and everyone in life does not get a trophy nor should they need a trophy. All that does is breed a thought that everyone should get rewarded and that is not a reality of adulthood.