Kids and Sports: Eight Strategies to Teach Kids How to Handle Disappointment and Lose like a Winner

Tamar Chansky, Ph.D.

 

It’s after April 15, the taxes are in the mail, and now it’s time to tackle the real challenge of spring — little league. Well, not exactly, but all over the country, kids of all ages are gearing up for the new season of sports from little tikes, to varsity players. Parents are approaching this rite of childhood with a combination of excitement and dread as they ponder the impending vicissitudes: the thrill of success, and the agony of defeat—not the euphemism, the real deal— registering in every fiber of their child’s being and right there for everyone to see.

 

Kids may start out with the best intentions and grip on their emotions picture— the Norman Rockwell crack of the bat, roar of the crowds— but with the first error (or perceived error) things degenerate quickly and it’s Jackson Pollock on a bad day. There’s the pre-game freak out, the post-game melt down, the throwing down of the glove, bat, or whatever the case may be, followed by the “I hate everything, everything stinks, I quit” self-recrimination rant that occurs once the doors auto-shut on the mini-van. 

 

Why is it that some kids can’t lose? Is it the parents, über focused on getting them on a Division One team in college, whose pressure makes it impossible for kids to accept anything else but beyond the best? While there is no doubt that those success-crazed parents gone wild don’t help and need to be benched themselves, usually they only broadcast in stereo the message going through a child’s own mind: winning is everything; losing is the end of the world as we know it.

 

It’s also clear that our culture is out of whack, witness the 5:00 am sports practices, travel tournaments for 2^nd graders, and cut-throat competition for all. While rectifying these variables will certainly improve the outcome, it will not eliminate the problem of kids who fall apart in the face of defeat. Especially since many of these kids fall apart even with just the anticipation of defeat. So losing isn’t the real disaster for these kids, their relationship to losing, is the disaster.