Q: Our 10-year-old son is such a poor sport that we’ve put the board games away.
He also acts like this in minor hockey, but his coach says his competitive nature will do wonders for his self-esteem. I am not so sure.
A: I think your son’s coach is making a common but awful mistake correlating self-esteem to a drive to win at all costs. Poor sports have little positive self-esteem. If anything, those who overreact with a loss have weaker self-esteem than the rest of us.
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We live in a competitive world, one built on wins and losses.
However, it becomes a problem when we shift from how well we perform to whether winning or losing becomes a part of who we are as people. Now we are no longer talking about winning as much as about being a winner, or on the other end of the scale, becoming a loser. Whether you are a winner or a loser matters not to me as much as understanding and appreciating that either way you are struggling with a lousy self-esteem and neither winning nor losing is going to do much to raise it.
You can help your son by working with him to rebuild his self-esteem, making sure that you have your daily routines down pat, that he sleeps well, substituting junk food for nutrition, is neat when he leaves the house and most of all that he knows that you, his dad and his brother love him to pieces, even when his brother mates him in a game of chess.
I think you should take the board games out of the closet and play as many games as the four of you can together. Of course, the game stops the moment your oldest son has a tantrum and does not start again until he has apologized to the rest of you for his poor behaviour. When he does that, you can have fun again and carry on where you left off.
What your son will hopefully discover is that he can appreciate his own well-being regardless of his natural born drive to competitiveness.
Jacklin Andrews is a family counsellor from Saskatchewan. Contact: jandrews@producer.com.
