Why I Let My Granddaughter, 4, Lose
By Bob Brody April 18, 2023 6:23 pm ET Photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto ‘Race me!” 4-year-old Lucia demands. So I do. Off my granddaughter sprints down the driveway, giving herself a head start, the front gate our finish line. But soon I pull close. “Here I come!” I warn. “I’m gonna win!” “No!” she protests at the top of her lungs. “No!” But I win. I’m trying to teach her about competition. Decades ago, I raced my son Michael, too, only occasionally letting him win. Then one summer day, on a beach in Long Island, Michael won for real, blowing my doors off. And one day, probably sooner rather than later if only because I’m 71, Lucia will win for real, too. All my adult life, I’ve played sports with kids, from family members and neighbors to strangers. Baseball, basketball, football, soccer, tennis, track, y
By
Bob Brody
Photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto
‘Race me!” 4-year-old Lucia demands. So I do. Off my granddaughter sprints down the driveway, giving herself a head start, the front gate our finish line. But soon I pull close.
“Here I come!” I warn. “I’m gonna win!”
“No!” she protests at the top of her lungs. “No!”
But I win. I’m trying to teach her about competition.
Decades ago, I raced my son Michael, too, only occasionally letting him win. Then one summer day, on a beach in Long Island, Michael won for real, blowing my doors off. And one day, probably sooner rather than later if only because I’m 71, Lucia will win for real, too.
All my adult life, I’ve played sports with kids, from family members and neighbors to strangers. Baseball, basketball, football, soccer, tennis, track, you name it. I’ve formed a philosophy about how to train kids in athletic competition. They should win some, but they should also lose some. In the interest of striking the right balance, I typically look to maintain a ratio of about 50-50.
So, for example, I’ll smack away an attempted layup or fling a fastball past a batter, just to make a point. But a minute later, I may back off to allow a touchdown or a winning forehand down the line. The idea is for kids to taste both victory and defeat, and then be free to decide which they like better. So it is with Lucia. If everything comes easy, she’ll never be prepared to manage anything hard.
Granted, losing hurts. I’ve never quite recovered from getting cut in tryouts for my eighth-grade basketball team. But losing is also instructive and fortifying. Losing motivates you to bring out your best. Lucia should understand that nobody deserves an award simply for showing up, and that nothing makes you want to win more than losing. “I’ve failed over and over again in my life,” Michael Jordan says in a commercial. “And that is why I succeed.”
Sports is a school, its curriculum a lesson in how we’re always our own toughest competition. At its best, competition teaches cooperation and collaboration. Besides, all of life is a kind of race—for a mate, a job, the next buck. The sooner we learn the stakes are Darwinian, the better we’ll survive. “A horse never runs so fast,” Ovid wrote, “as when he has other horses to catch up and outpace.”
“Again!” Lucia insists. “Race me again!” So again I race her. We dash down the street. I’m trailing by a yard, but again I issue my threat.
“Here I come! I’m gonna win!”
“No!” she gasps between breaths. “I’m gonna win!” And then 3-foot-tall Lucia shifts into a higher gear, inching ahead. She wins, smiling and laughing, the exertion leaving her cheeks flushed. “I won!” she screams. “I got here first!”
I love the look in her eyes. “See how good it feels?” I ask her.
“Yes!” she exclaims. But even though we seem finished for the day, she’s just getting started. “Again!” she cries out, radiating the spirit of a champion. “Race me again!”
Mr. Brody, a consultant and essayist in Italy, is author of the memoir “Playing Catch with Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age.”
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