Rooting for Your Child to Lose vs. Rooting for Your Child to Win
There are three types of losers.
- Those people who accept losing.
- The people who learn from losing.
- Then of course you have your sore losers.
When you win all the time, it’s easy to fall victim to the sore loser mentality. If you lose all the time, it’s easy to let being a loser become part of your character. Therefore, especially when it comes to young athletes, it’s imperative that you win more than you lose, but don’t win too much.
Rooting for Your Child to Lose
When a young athlete goes on an abnormally long winning streak, losing in the near feature may be the best outcome for their long term growth.
As a parent or coach of an athlete who wins all the time, it’s your job to put your athlete in situations that increase their risk of losing. While this may seem counterproductive, it may be the best thing you could do for your athlete.
A research study done at the University of Alberta by sport psychologist John Dunn found the following:
Athletes who think failure is not an option will eventually experience some form of emotional burnout, or put incredible levels of pressure on themselves by creating an unattainable standard of perfection and are emotionally exhausted all the time because nothing they do is ever good enough.
Sore losers and perfectionist don’t learn from failure. This is detrimental because failure is the greatest teacher. Rooting for your child to lose and setting them up to lose sounds a bit crazy, but the alternative is worse. Raising a child who wins 100% of the time is setting that child up for major disappointment and possibly depression later in life.
Rooting for Your Child to Win
On the other hand, when a young athlete goes on an abnormally long losing streak a different type of intervention is necessary. You want them to win, but winning is not the only outcome to creates success in this situation. On the contrary, the best approach to an abnormally long losing streak is to figure out the specific lessons to teach. There must be a set of circumstances that is causing the losing streak. Your job as a parent or coach is to diagnose those circumstances and use them to teach:
- Perspective on what’s important and what’s not
- How to manage frustration
- Overcoming self-doubt
- Not to blame others
- Personal responsibility
- How to move on and not dwell on the past
- Overcoming difficulty
- Leadership under adversity
Next, you must find out if the child wants to dedicate him or herself to the sport. If so, focus on the things that are under the child’s control and help them make gains. Help the child develop a love for the sport by focusing on sportsmanship, camaraderie, and the process of getting a little better each week.
Ultimately, after addressing those two things you must evaluate the environment. Do you need to change it to prevent a losing mentality from settling in? I believe being a member of a losing team for more than a couple of seasons is unproductive. Especially if there are no clear signs of a turnaround in process. At some point you must consider moving the child into a winning environment. However, you must not ignore the risk that the child may sit the bench on a winning team. I believe the only situation that justifies sacrificing playing time is when a child is at risk of becoming a complacent loser.