Do you beat your child?
When the checkers are down, when Candyland is yours for the taking, when one easy (for you) basket will establish you as the premier hoopster in your family, do you call forth your panoply of adult skills, play the game hard and beat your child?
Or do you cut your opponent the tiniest bit of slack, and let the little tyke win?
It is a question every parent faces, beginning with those first, lopsided races down the block between a parent and a toddler with, say, two months’ experience in walking.
So a parent learns how to “run” very, very slowly. Before you know it, you find yourself slipping the child the coveted Queen Frostine card in Candyland or playing a deliberately careless game of checkers.
The subterfuge possibilities are endless. Racing your child in the pool, you stroke only with your arms. Playing one-on-one basketball, you take wild shots with little chance of success.
“I think sometimes it’s healthy to let them win,” says Mary Graham, a Melrose Park mother who has been known to throw a game of Uno to her 5-year-old daughter. “It gives them a sense of achievement; it builds their confidence.”
But some parents think letting kids win is a bad idea.
“If they think they can win in everything they do, all of a sudden when they’re in a situation with other kids or at school when they don’t, they won’t know how to handle it,” said Michele Stevenson, a Northwest Side mother of four.
Ginger Williams of the North Side never lets her 11-year-old son win in their frequent chess matches, although he has beaten her on his own several times.
“I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing or not, but I keep playing to win,” she said. “Sometimes he’s gotten so frustrated he refuses to play with me for a while. It would just go so against my grain, my honesty and integrity, to let him win.
“Or maybe I’m just a mean person,” she added guiltily. “It does feel sort of brutal to beat him all the time.”
Wielders of the awesome power that is parenthood cannot help but wonder at the proper course. Should parents cheat to lose?
With young children, sure.
Children under 6 are incapable of following game rules, said John Friedman, a child psychologist on the faculty of Northwestern University Medical School, because they are accustomed to fantasy play in which they make their own rules.
“It’s cheating for an adult to follow the rules and consistently beat the child at a board game,” he said. “Adults say to me they want to teach the child how to win and lose. But if the adult always wins, what is he teaching? That you should never lose; that you should always take advantage of an overmatched opponent; that the parent himself has no capacity to tolerate losing.”
With older children, parents can start mixing in a few hard-fought games that the children lose, he said. Even then, care should be taken.
“As kids reach the end of age 11, they start to take responsibility for their successes-and for their failures,” said Kim Dell’Angela, pediatric psychologist at Loyola University Medical Center. “They are going to take (losing) personally. It is going to be integrated in how they think about themselves.”
She suggests that parents explain to their children how they won. “You should show them that they’re not losing because they’re stupid,” she said.
Eventually, the question becomes moot when our children can best us fair and square.
“The day one of my sons can legitimately beat me one-on-one on the basketball court, when I’m trying my hardest, is going to be interesting,” said John McNicholas, of Lake Forest, the athletic father of two athletic boys. “I look forward to it. I’ll know his time has come, and mine is over.”
