The Best Ever Solution To Help Your Child Lose Gracefully.
Is your child a sore loser? Coach them to lose gracefully without losing your cool or dealing with their meltdowns, upsets and disappointment. – Simple steps to bring fun back to family gatherings.
What should have been a lovely bonding time for our family ended in chaos.
We’d been to crazy golf, and before long, it ended in tears, stomping off and meltdowns.
My daughter was losing, so she wanted to take multiple swings and take the ball and place it where it was easy to get it in the hole.
The other families looked on in shock as a heated argument broke out.
And as you’d expect… this trip didn’t end well.
Is your child a sore loser?
For years this was a BIG sticking point for my family, little did I know it was so easy to change once I knew how.
The Best Ever Solution To Help Your Child Lose Gracefully
First, don’t teach, lecture or tell off the ‘bad loser.’
As, you may well already know this course of action never goes well.
So, what NOT to do.
1. Don’t tell them to calm down, or not be upset. Allow them to be upset. You can’t change someone’s feelings by telling them not to feel the way they are.
2. Don’t add fuel to the fire. When your child is upset, first calm the whole situation down. Remember no learning is happening when you or your child is triggered.
3. In that moment don’t teach them the rules of the game, (they already know!); don’t tell them ‘you’re cheating’(they know!); don’t make them feel worse than they already do. Believe it or not, your child doesn’t want to be feeling or acting like this.
Whenever my daughter was pitching a fit, I used to have my mum’s voice in my head telling me… “Being a sore loser isn’t doing her any favours. You have to teach her to lose well, or no one is going to want to play with her.”
And she’s right, no one wants their child to be ostracised by their friends, the one who cheats when she’s losing, or the one who always abandons the game halfway through.
When your child is a sore loser, it’s important to intervene.
It’s all in how to respond that gets us the results we want.
The Language of Listening®, the coaching model I use and teach, taught me a new way to ‘see’ what was really going on and the best way to support my daughter.
My lightbulb moment
Now my mum would tell me that kids ‘need’ to learn that you don’t always win, and that life’s not fair…Yes, I know.
Stay with me here,
Our goal is to teach our children to lose gracefully but first they need the chance to feel successful, and that it’s possible for them to win.
I’ve often heard the advice to not let your child win as you’ll only reinforce that she can’t handle losing.
I look at it differently.
I have every faith my child can handle her emotions and reactions; I know she can learn to lose gracefully. There must be something in her way.
It was this: How can you win ‘well’ if you never get a chance to win. Ever?
My daughter was the more reactive one, the one who was ‘told’ off more, who didn’t often get to feel successful. She never got a chance to feel the delight of winning. Of course, she wouldn’t be happy if others won as she never did. Of course she would try everything to ‘win.’
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The Best Ever Solution To Help Your Child Lose Gracefully.
This is how I turned things around.
I started to play “mummy rules” games with my daughter. These were games that we played, just the two of us. It was set up in an ‘over the top way,’ where she knew she could change the rules at the last minute, she could “cheat”and laugh and win ‘over’ me.
We played silly card games, ridiculous football in the garden, and I took her to play crazy golf where we made up the rules as we went. We didn’t keep score, and we laughed and joked the whole time round the course. She knew this was our special game time.
Our children are clever. They know that the rules you play together aren’t the same when they play with others.
Don’t bend the rules for her in a ‘normal’ game.
You’re not letting her win in family games.
You’re not trying to make her happy in the moment while you’re playing at ‘normal’ times.
You are watching her learn what it feels like to win… (even if it’s silly “mummy rules”) so she then can go on to lose… Happily.
The Best Ever Solution To Help Your Child Lose Gracefully. How do I know this works?
A few weeks later my in-laws came to stay and guess what? We played crazy golf. And this time, she played ‘by the rules,’ keeping score for everyone. She came last, and she didn’t care! She’d learnt to lose graciously by learning what it felt like to win.
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“Camilla was the answer to our prayers. I am endlessly grateful to her and only wish I’d found her sooner.” Louisa, Mum of 2
“Camilla coached us through different methods. Methods which I had never thought about, but gave us incredible results in a very short space of time, methods which we still use now and are so easy to implement on a daily basis. I am no longer the shouty mum I used to be. And my relationship with my kids has changed so much, I often wonder why I hadn’t started this journey sooner.’ Lucy, Mum of 3
“I was stuck in a pretty unpleasant vicious circle, with three awesome small children and was ruining it. I was afraid they would grow up and not trust me. Within the first couple of weeks working with Camilla I saw positive changes.” Claire, Mum of 3
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