Q: Our 11-year-old daughter is about as sore a loser as you can find. and both my wife and I sense that we are responsible for her poor behaviour.
We used to let her win at games when she was young, thinking we were fortifying her self-esteem by giving her these easy victories.
We failed to appreciate that our daughter began to feel that winning was her natural right, but she recently had a meltdown while playing board games because she could not accept she was losing.
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We need to do something about this. Our daughter cannot grow up expecting to win all of the time.
A: I don’t think that you should get too discouraged. You are not the first parents who have engineered wins for the kids for the wrong reasons. The bonus for your daughter is that you and your wife are recognizing the errors of your ways and are willing to do something about it.
The bottom line is that it is not too late for all three of you.
You can help your daughter fix this thing but it is going to take a little time and a lot of patience. Let’s start with the board games that led to your daughter’s meltdown.
Board games are great. They are all about chance. Winning and losing is the luck of the draw. You don’t win at board games because your moment of self-esteem is higher than is someone else’s. Neither do you lose because it is lower. I do not know why you win and lose. You just do.
If your daughter has another meltdown when she loses, you can ask her to leave the room until she calms down. Then you go back to the game and try again. And you keep doing this until one day your daughter figures out that having fun, playing the game, is all that there is to it.
None of the above should be tied into her self-esteem. Of course, she is going to figure this out faster if you and your wife set some good examples of winning and losing for her.
Just make sure that you do. Oh, and by the way, there is a significant message in life built into all of this. Most overly successful people whom I have met will tell you that they just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Their success was not based on manufacturing their breaks in life. Their success was based on knowing what to do when those breaks came to them. Much of it is luck, just as it is with the board games.
Self-esteem is an important theme through all of this. The higher the self-esteem, the more likely it is that your daughter will be excited about the opportunities waiting for her as she grows up.
But self-esteem is not based on winning and losing. Self-esteem is based on accepting who it is she or you are as persons. The more you appreciate that magical self making its way through the world the more likely it is that you will have the personal strength you need to fill in the blanks when life takes on one of its inevitable nasty turns. It is important and I am glad that you are encouraging personal growth for your daughter’s underlying self-esteem.
Jacklin Andrews is a family counsellor from Saskatchewan. Contact: jandrews@producer.com.
