Your Child is a Loser – Thank Goodness!

One of my favorite lines from The Incredibles is “Because when everyone is special, no one is.” How true.

No outs in baseball. No score in soccer. Everyone gets a trophy or a medal for “participation.” No championships or playoffs.

Seriously – why play sports? But the bigger question is: what is wrong with losing? The no outs and no score tend to be for the younger kids. People are so afraid of allowing their little ones to experience losing, they’ve sanitized the games to death.

My question again – what’s wrong with losing? And the inverse – how about the kids who win? How come they don’t get to enjoy the accolades of victory?

Our pastor at church spoke about this last weekend. His points hit home and the bigger message struck me to the core.

He pointed out that the kid who makes that “meaningless” out might feel bad that he or she didn’t get credit for a good play – right! What about the kid who scores the goal (that doesn’t count)?

Note to parents: everyone knows who won, even if it doesn’t show up on anyone’s stats sheet. Why can’t we just admit it and say one team won today and one team lost, even when they are five? The organizers say: “because it’s about having fun” – but isn’t winning fun? Why are we demonizing losing by not recognizing it? It’s ok to lose too.

Our pastor then spoke about his son’s experience wrestling and how there’s a clear victor in that sport, no matter what age. His five-year-old son tasted the sweets of victory and the bile of defeat, all in one afternoon. He didn’t like it; he cried. BUT – he started to understand how the way of the world works. People win and people lose. And that’s okay.

The pstor’s bigger message, however, is that God doesn’t always give us what we call “wins” in life. Sometimes bad stuff happens and that’s ok. He still loves us. When you lose your job, it might be because you needed to go a different path. When your marriage dissolves, maybe God released you from a bad situation. When death occurs, that person has gone home. The point is that the stuff we consider bad isn’t always bad in God’s eyes. He may even be giving you a gift.

The importance of this message cannot be discounted. When we insulate our children from defeat when they are 6, 7, 12, 15, what is going to happen to them when they are 25 and living on their own? (Yes, they can do that by then.) If they weren’t taught how to deal with defeat, they start doing bad things when bad things happen, because we haven’t equipped them with other coping mechanisms.

Then, what will they think God is for? They won’t understand why the bad stuff is happening. They may even think God hates them. And then we have failed as parents.

Our pastor referenced a recent article by Lori Gottlieb in The Atlantic called “How to Land Your Kids in Therapy.” She is a clinical psychologist and she makes some great points.

When she was in school, she was taught how to deal with the big issues within the human mind, but when she got into actual therapy practice, she started seeing patients who had awesome lives, loving families and good friends who simply were not happy and now they were in therapy.

Why?

They had been insulated their whole lives from the bad stuff. Their parents were so terrified of their children’s anxiety or stress that they didn’t equip them with the tools to understand and deal with adversity. Now, we have a generation of young adults who cannot find happiness within themselves because they don’t know what the adverse is. And, when the adverse happens, they have no idea what to do. Worse, some parents are still so involved in their 20-somethings lives, the child still can’t experience this.

Folks, let’s grow up ourselves and start to see the big picture – bad stuff happening to our 6-year-olds are life lesson. It makes them better adults. It shows them that God loves them even when they lose.

Tragedy, death, sickness, poverty – those are bad things that we need to discuss with our kids so they understand how it relates to them.  God still loves you when you lose at soccer and he loves you when you lose your job. Let’s get that right in our kids’ heads so they know that too.

Getting called out at first base feels bad for a few minutes but it makes that homerun feel so much better, right?

Marijo Tinlin is the editor in chief of Family First, one of the oldest family-oriented websites on the internet. She is also the author of the new book “How to Raise an American Patriot, Making it Okay for Our Kids to Be Proud to Be American” available at www.raisinganamericanpatriot.com.