Children and Competition

Cross posted from the Burn Pit.
Exit question: Which of these dorks is a 18 year old TSO?

No More Thrill of Victory or Agony of Defeat?

A buddy of mine who likes to get me fired up sent me an email this weekend that seemed clearly intent on doing just that. He is the father of two young boys, both under 7, and one of the “games” they got for Christmas was something called “Snail’s Pace Race”, which according to the Company that makes the game (Ravensburger) is enjoyed thusly:

Let’s Play! Place the colored wooden snails on their matching starting arrow. At the beginning of the game, each player chooses the color snail that they think will come in first and the one that they think will come in last. The youngest player starts by rolling the two wooden die. They then advance the snails that match the colors rolled. If they roll two of the same color, they would then move that color snail two spaces. Play continues until all of the snails have reached their color circle at the other end of the game board. Just remember to keep track of which snails were first and last. The players who chose the right snails all win! What Do You Learn? Color recognition & task completion

Now, according to the one line in there, “[t]he players who chose the right snails all win!” one would assume that there are indeed winners and losers to the game. But my friend pointed out some of the comments to the game on Amazon.

Jack from Baltimore endorses it:

Our 5-year old loves this game and even plays it by himself and gives us blow by blow action if I’m making supper and can’t play. Our 11 yr-old likes it as well. Probably because losers are winners and the kids love to see how different the races turns out each time. The bizarre thing is the game is a lot like betting on the races without the exchange of money… so that aspect of it might not sit well with some. We, however, love to cheer on the colorful snails!

Kathleen from Tallahassee:

We bought this game for our son when he was barely 3 years old. He is now almost 6 and still loves it. The game is simple enough for him to play with his friends without adult help, since everything is based on colors and no reading is required. The beauty of this game, though, is that children can have fun without competing against each other. Since all children move all of the snails, it is the snails who race and who win or lose. Since no child loses, there are no hurt feelings.

One lass using the nom de guerre “Amazon Queen” stated her love of the game, although she misspelled “loser”:

The magic in the game is that the SNAILS are the winners so that no child is a winner or looser….PERFECT for the competitive types… no tears…. just fun betting on which colored snail will WIN!!! One of the VERY best games for little ones…VERY BEST!

Anyway, my friend snarkily commented:

In summary, goodbye Snails and best of luck not winning your way out of the recycling bin.

I’m pretty sure he’ll be sitting down to another rousing edition of “which colored snail can make it to the end first” at some point today, so no need to fear for the multi-colored wooden Gastropoda, but his underlying point was that things like this lead to the “wussification” of kids.

What do you think?

I found a video by some guy proclaiming himself the “Parent Professor” who provides some good context, and discusses at what age it is appropriate to start competition in earnest.

I’m not even sure that in a game (like Snails) that is entirely driven by random events, that competition can be so detrimental. The law of averages would dictate that if your two children play an infinite number of times, the chances of them each winning half the games is fairly high. It’s not like one kid can get too upset that he rolled bad dice that he might forever despair of his inability to help his inanimate piece of wood get home the fastest and thus quit the genre entirely. Or is it?

OK, so if we assume that the game’s design is proper, and that at lower ages focusing on winning and losing is not important, at what age should we shift? Consider this AP Article from 2003:

As the final buzzer sounds in the Northview Elementary gymnasium, parents burst into applause and 20 children in red and blue T-shirts line up to shake hands.

Their cheeks are flushed, their hair damp with sweat, and most of them are grinning. But the scoreboard is blank.

“It doesn’t bother me,” says 9-year-old Chelsy Stout. “I just have fun playing.”

In the Harrison County Parks and Recreation basketball league, standings for the under-13 teams are maintained only in the mind. Scores are kept by just a few parents, surreptitiously, on tiny notepads.

Like at least 2,300 communities nationwide, this north-central West Virginia county is taking a different approach to youth sports, toning down the competition to stress sportsmanship and equal playing time for every child, regardless of talent.

You know what makes it really easy to not be a sore sport? Never losing. I’m not entirely sure I get the concept of teaching sportsmanship by not keeping score, and I really don’t get the equal playing time idea. Bill Belichick isn’t going to put me in at right guard against Miami this week for the simple reason that I would suck. It doesn’t really destroy my self worth as much as you might think.

I grew up in a small town in Massachusetts, and my Dad was the Athletic Director and a gym coach. He wanted me to play basketball, as he had at the University of Maine. It became apparent quite quickly that basketball really wasn’t my thing. In fact, I was so bad that a kid beat me up on the bus one time coming back from a game and told me to “stop sucking.” That was in the 7th grade. So, I quit, and joined the wrestling team. I mean, it’s bad enough when you stink at a sport, but it’s even worse when you are so bad that your own teammates want to beat you up. And if I could find the dude that beat me up I would shake his hand for it.

In my school you could wrestle varsity in the 7th grade if you were good enough. It was simple mathematics, I had 63 kids in my class, only 31 males, and a wrestling team needs kids. So, in true egalitarian manner, if you won in your wrestle off at your weight class, you started. And for the first three years, I rarely if ever stepped out on the mat. But, I got better every time David Lupiani beat me senseless during practice. And by my Sophomore year, I was much better.

One of my buddies on the team didn’t have so much luck. I don’t know his exact record, but John Blanchard had to have been like 1-54 from Freshman through Junior years. He just was bad. He was in a weight class with no one else though, so he walked out, took his beating, and sat back down. Then his senior year he turned into a beast. I could say I don’t know how it happened, but I do know: he was tired of losing, and spent every waking moment working his butt off to get better. And get better he did, winning the Western Mass Wrestling Tournament his senior year. I’ve never seen a man more dedicated to his sport, or someone who derived more pleasure from winning. He didn’t spend 5 years getting thumped to just quit, he kept coming back. He was the epitome of perserverance, and it paid off.

I ended up good enough that I could wrestle in college. Technically, I was just good enough to allow everyone in the Southern Conference an easy win when they drew me in the tournament. My college career consisted of not eating much, and struggling in vain to not end up with my scapula in contact with the mat for 3 seconds. I didn’t do well at it. But the things I learned from wrestling would be all the same traits that would serve me well in 12 years of life in the Infantry.

So, what say you. Is this trend away from winners and losers a good thing? Or are we setting up children for failure when we don’t challenge them to achieve success?

(For those who care, I am the ridiculous stick-figure with the glasses in the picture above. This was when I placed third in the 1988 Massachusetts Division II wrestling championships. Curse you Chuck Hassenfuss of Dedham!)

Category: Politics