Adventures in Parenting, Vol. 52

A weekend in which Number One Son had to learn some hard lessons about competition and being on the losing end of it.

First there was the basketball game in a town just north of here; my son’s little team ran into a buzzsaw. The other boys were better organized, more aggressive, and bigger . . . and took our boys out of the game early. At halftime it was 15-2. Needless to say the end result didn’t go our way. Number One Son loves basketball, but he has some size and skill to develop, and he shares his father’s intuitive athleticism (i.e., not much of it). So. We had a long talk on the way home about responding when a team is eating your lunch, how sometimes it just happens that you run into a group that is better than you.

Then there was the outcome of the Big Sporting Event last night, in which the favored team got its nose bloodied and in which the reigning league MVP kinda got exposed especially in the character portion of the contest. Early on, when the game was close, Number One Son was having a good time (he was cheering for the Carolina Panthers) and doing a lot of whooping and carrying on at all the plays. It was good fun, and he and The Triathlete did a lot of teasing each other (we were happy for Carolina to win, but wanted Manning’s last game as a pro to be this victory). As the second half wore on, Number One did a lot less whooping, and by the end of the game he was really disheartened. It’s the first time I’ve seen him really invested in an athletic contest, and the first time he’s had to deal with that kind of disappointment.

As his dad, and as a man who has sometimes taken my team’s losses hard (read: every time the North Carolina Tar Heels dropped a basketball game in the period 1997-2013), I am responsible to help him see that losing is not the end of the world, that it happens to everyone, that championships are special because they’re so rare, and that what matters is your character in victory and defeat. And I also have to let him be sad and tell him I know just how it feels to be let down. I’d spare him the pain of it, but then he wouldn’t learn what he needs to learn if he’s going to grow up.