Teach Your Children How To Lose – Give Them Opportunities To Grow

It is important to learn how to lose. By always letting your child win, you deprive him or her of the opportunity to grow. It also makes it harder for your child when he or she encounters defeat in the future.

Losing gives children opportunities to grow

It is normal for parents to want to make things a little easier for their children. This in itself is not negative, as long as it is in moderation. Otherwise, our natural need to protect our children can become harmful overprotection. If everything is easy for a child, it can have negative consequences for his or her personality.

Most parents have let their children win in one way or another at some point, but this is not the best solution in the long run.

When we play games or play with our children, we sometimes pretend to lose so that they will not be sad or angry. When we do, we actually deprive them of excellent opportunities to grow.

By letting them win, we deprive them of the chance to develop psychological strategies for dealing with defeat and failure in life. Children must also be able to experience the emotions they normally feel in a defeat in order to learn to deal with them.

Teach your children how to lose

Undeserved victories can actually have negative consequences. According to a study conducted by the University of Virginia on children between the ages of 4 and 5, children who win undeserved victories develop a disproportionate perception of their own abilities that does not correspond to reality.

This can have adverse consequences on the psychological level.

If children believe that they succeed in a certain task when it is not, they are less likely to absorb information that helps them continue to develop their skills.

This in turn impairs their ability to learn. Continuously making a task easier for a child, the child may not realize the importance of learning. If the child always has someone who solves his or her problem, he or she will not try to solve anything on their own.

The benefits of learning how to lose

Here are some reasons why it is important for children to learn how to lose weight:

• Learning to lose helps to protect and strengthen the child’s self-esteem. If the child learns to lose, he or she does not see defeat as something personal or as a lack of his or her abilities. The child realizes that defeat is normal. You can not always win. Therefore, it does not affect the child’s self – esteem when he or she loses.
• Letting the child lose also improves his or her social skills. He or she learns to participate in games and games with a good attitude. If your child then loses, he or she will not be upset.
• In addition, failure allows the child to focus more on the activity itself, rather than on the outcome. The child learns how to get the most out of the activity instead of worrying about winning or losing.

• The child learns to understand the value of making an effort and trying. Success is the result of effort, not luck.

The importance of developing tolerance for frustration

These life lessons help your child develop tolerance for frustration. The child does not get frustrated as easily if he or she learns to see obstacles as challenges.

It allows your child to deal with adversity without breaking down, making him or her a stronger adult.

Children who know how to lose are also more likely to cooperate and help others.

They understand that the most important thing is not to win, and that makes them less competitive and selfish in the future.

Learning to lose also helps to give your child a more realistic self-image, and it helps him or her to take on challenges in a better way. The child then becomes more aware of his abilities, opportunities and limitations.

Wins and defeats

Manage the concepts of profit and defeat openly in your homes. Younger children can be introduced to these concepts through stories and fairy tales.

You can help turn your child’s defeat into a win,  and it’s easier than you think. All you need to do is validate your child’s feelings by focusing on the positive.

For example, tell your child that even if he loses, he should not feel bad. The important thing is that he had fun.

In the same way, it is of course just as important that children feel like winning sometimes. If they never do, because they are the least, for example, it is good to let them win sometimes or play games where chance decides who wins. They must learn to be good winners.

If you teach your child that it is not negative to lose, but rather an opportunity to learn and try again, teach him or her a useful lesson that will help your child even in adulthood. Above all, you give your child useful opportunities to grow.