Children need to experience losing to teach them how to overcome and pull through from failure, experts say. One dad has agreed on this and wanted to teach this lesson to his two sons. After his son has missed a tennis game, Sam Weinman has learned the positive thing of losing in a game: it teaches a valuable life lesson on how to deal with life's challenges and how to recover from it.
A father-of-two has learned an important lesson in parenting after his son missed a tennis game. Sam Weinman learned that children sometimes need to get through losing in a game to teach them how to overcome life's most overwhelming challenges and move on from it.
Weinman has prepared and practiced his son, Charlie, well for a tennis match. He said all the right things parents would say before a match: have fun, respect the opponent and one match at a time. However as the match unfolded, everything went wrong. Charlie lost the game. Disappointed with the result, the kid did not want to play tennis anymore.
From this experience, Weinman started to think about losing in a game. He said how people deal with success and failure in sports early on can be a precursor to how they may navigate more difficult challenges later on in life.
"This is an area I speak a great deal about, this whole concept of how you develop resiliency in people," Dr. Jerry Brodie, a prominent child psychologist from Greenwich, Connecticut, said to ESPN. He added that over the years people will deal with failure, painful events and disaster, and they have to learn how to get on with life afterwards. For Brodie, the sports is a natural way to develop resiliency because of the idea that one can't always win.
Losing in a game is never the end of life, in fact according to Weinman, it can be a start. Dr. Levey Friedman, an author and a sociologist at Harvard, said teaching resilience now sets kids up for success because they learn that failure is not the end of the world, it's actually just a chance to try again, the Parents has learned.
Weinman said: "Think of it this way: if you can't handle things going awry when the stakes are small, you're in for that much rougher a ride when the real challenges start to mount." In the end the father-of-two suggested that losing is not only something we should tolerate, but rather that we need.
