Let the Children Lose

I was talking to a friend the other day and he told me his daughter was playing in a soccer league. That’s a good thing, right? The kids getting a lot of exercise, running around, playing.

I asked if his daughter was any good and he said it didn’t matter, cause they played in a league that didn’t keep score. The kids ran around and goofed off and had a lot of fun playing but they were not particularly very good at what they were doing. Nobody cared.

And that kind of bothered me. Not that she was or wasn’t any good. No, what bothered me was that there was nothing in the competition that she was engaging in that was going to bring out the better side of her abilities. Nothing to bring out her competitive spirit as a human being either. There’s nothing in the makeup of those games that gets people to try to do their best.

Not keeping score encourages mediocrity. It encourages people to not be accountable for their actions. If you are playing defense and you make a mistake that allows the other team to score, it is shrugged off as not that big of a deal It becomes okay to let your teammates down because, “hey, it doesn’t matter if I perform well, because we’re not even keeping score.”

A sporting event where you don’t keep score might not reward incompetence, but it doesn’t reward competence either, which in it’s way, by proxy creates an atmosphere where competence doesn’t matter anymore. And that is not a good thing.

If it becomes okay to NOT try to do your best in soccer, it kind of leaks over to other parts of your life, such as allowing yourself to NOT try to do your best in school or on your job, or in your relationships. It is NOT good for a society to have children being taught the lesson that the efforts to try to win and to excel and to compete are not some of the most important things that they will ever learn . The efforts to practice and to try to work hard at getting better might not always translate to a team winning, but it is that effort that helps make them into the best person that they can be.

The worst thing about this whole “not keeping score” syndrome is that it is really just a ridiculous cop-out of a straw house created by adults to try to “protect their children” from the big, bad wolf that they fear will take place if their kids are exposed to the real world. No one asked kids if they wanted to stop keeping score. It was just some buttinsky parents trying to force their warped, politically correct ways onto as many people as possible. As if losing a game is a big deal in the great scheme of things.

Mommy and Daddy need to stop trying to protect their little girls from some kind of imaginary evil thing that they think might happen if their young child has to experience the concept of losing a game that they play. Some of the great lessons of life are learned when you play a game or compete at something and, at first, lose and or be unsuccessful. And then , you go out, overcome those obstacles, and make yourself better, and you come back the second time and triumph and be a success. It is called growth.

The things children learn and do when they are young follows them into adult life. We are running the risk of breeding a generation of mediocrity. And for what? So that the parents don’t have to see their children lose at soccer?

Parents, you are becoming an obstruction to your children’s growth. Let the children lose.