>> I'd definitely try to get my kid into sports so he can learn to lose early and often.
So nobody, kid or not, wants to fail/lose all the time but after watching my three kids play lots of different sports the pain they feel after a loss is very fleeting and minor. The parents hold onto it for much longer; the kids just want to know if they can get ice cream.
I wish I could have figured out if I was good at Football. There were 120 people on the team and unless you were friends with the coaches kid, you never played. I was always first pick when doing 5th grade football because I could catch and was fast.
Defense had 0 tryouts. There was literally 2 attempts at being a wide receiver. 0 attempts at being QB or lineman.
I remember catching both passes, but maybe I wasn't fast enough? Whatever the case it was obvious it was hand picked. And our team won 2 of 8 games.
At least no one can dispute how much I sucked at track lol.
I would argue that esports can have a similar effect, unless it’s a moba, which sort of encourages a bad attitude towards losing and your teammates. Starcraft, quake, or even chess can be amazing
It is true that helping a child learn about resiliency is important. As Carol Dweck says, the brain is like a muscle and effort can eventually be rewarded with skill. So it is good to praise effort and persistence. And failure is part of life and needs to be dealt with.
"No Contest, which has been stirring up controversy since its publication in 1986, stands as the definitive critique of competition. Drawing from hundreds of studies, Alfie Kohn eloquently argues that our struggle to defeat each other -- at work, at school, at play, and at home -- turns all of us into losers. ... No Contest makes a powerful case that "healthy competition" is a contradiction in terms. Because any win/lose arrangement is undesirable, we will have to restructure our institutions for the benefit of ourselves, our children, and our society. For this [1992] revised edition, Kohn adds a comprehensive account of how students can learn more effectively by working cooperatively in the classroom instead of struggling to be Number One. He also offers a pointed and personal afterword, assessing shifts in American thinking on competition and describing reactions to his provocative message."
From the book:
"If competitiveness is inherently compensatory, if it is an effort to prove oneself and stave off feelings of worthlessness, it follows that the healthier the individual (in the sense of having a more solid, unconditional sense of self-esteem), the less need there is to compete. The implication, we might say, is that the real alternative to being number one is not being number two but being psychologically free enough to dispense with rankings altogether. Interestingly, two sports psychologists have found a number of excellent athletes with "immense character strengths who don't make it in sports. They seem to be so well put together emotionally that there is no neurotic tie to sport." Since recreation almost always involves competition in our culture, those who are healthy enough not to need to compete may simply end up turning down those activities. ... Each culture provides its own mechanisms for dealing with self-doubt. ... Low self-esteem, then, is a necessary but not sufficient cause of competition. The ingredients include an aching need to prove oneself and the approved mechanism for doing so at other people's expense. ... I do not want to shy away from the incendiary implications of all of this. To suggest in effect that many of our heroes (entrepreneurs and athletes, movie stars and politicians) may be motivated by low self-esteem, to argue that our "state religion" is a sign of psychological ill-health -- this will not sit well with many people.(Page 103)"
So nobody, kid or not, wants to fail/lose all the time but after watching my three kids play lots of different sports the pain they feel after a loss is very fleeting and minor. The parents hold onto it for much longer; the kids just want to know if they can get ice cream.