This past weekend, the wife and I reached a huge milestone in our parenting adventure; we attended our daughter’s first soccer match. Actually, it was a mini soccer tournament between different elementary schools, which meant that we sat through seven, ten-minute matches. (It was co-ed teams that played five on five.) Though the day was colder than we expected, we had a good time watching, and the kid’s team came in second place.
But getting back to the point – the kid is now at the age where she is playing sports that have games. This isn’t like the sports classes we put her in when she was little, where the kids learn how to dribble a basketball, or pass a soccer ball. Nope, she’s on a team that plays games, therefore these kids will experience winning and losing, and all the emotions that come with that. It is a bit of a rite of passage.
And that passage has begun for some of the families there. When the tournament started, and teams began to be eliminated, kids started crying. By my observation; all the crying was coming from the boys. Even on my daughter’s team, when they lost the final by one goal, everyone was disappointed, but only the boys sat down and cried.
My kid, and she is very competitive, wasn’t happy at first, but once the sting of losing wore off, she started getting more philosophical about the whole thing. She told us that second place was better than how the four other teams did, and getting to the final is pretty impressive. It also helped that she went home with a medal, which was her first, and is hanging up on her wall.
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