How Competitions Are Good for Kids
There are pros and cons to putting young people in competitive situations like sports. In this story, we’ll cover the main plusses.
Help your child learn to collaborate.
In team-based competitions, children need to communicate and work together. The fact that they will face another team competitively can make them better collaborators. A good deal of evidence supports the benefits of team sports, in particular.
In a new study with more than 11,200 U.S. kids aged nine to 13, researchers found that kids involved in team sports like basketball and soccer were less likely to have signs of anxiety, depression, withdrawal, social problems, and attention problems.
Compared to children who didn’t play a team sport, the team players had 17 percent less difficulty socially in measures based on parents’ responses.
Help your child learn that other people think differently.
The team players may have had less difficulty socially because they had practiced cognitive empathy: understanding how others think. Many competitive activities require young people to anticipate what others may do in response to their actions. The first step is putting themselves in the other person’s shoes.
Help your child see their strengths and weaknesses.
To compete well over time, you need to recognize your strengths and weaknesses and those of your teammates or rivals.
Young people compare themselves to others to judge their strengths and find self-esteem outside the home. Social status becomes paramount. They may be influenced by their most socially successful peers—but it is helpful if they evaluate performance and have heroes in other areas. Competitions are a way to direct your child to admire skills, talent, and expertise.
Help your child find role models.
Again, think about sports. To quote the Institute of Competition Sciences,
We know that Lebron James is an expert at basketball because of his ridiculously high numbers of shots, rebounds, blocks, and ultimately wins. Without the competition to showcase his skills, would our students still be able to recognize him as a hero they aspire to?
In the same way, competitions can direct students to admire their peers who work hard and have measurable success, rather than students who experiment with drugs or drive fast.
Help your child celebrate success at all stages.
Parents and teachers may be concerned that competitions make some students feel like losers and crush their ambition. But it depends upon how the competition is designed. A well-designed competition includes recognition and celebrations of achievements along the way. Simply making it to the final round becomes a big achievement.
Teach your child to seek growth.
Seeing mistakes or failures as an opportunity to learn and improve is a valuable skill in many areas of life. Competitions make this concrete. They provide benchmarks. If you lose one game, you come back to play another round differently.
Along the way, your child ideally will learn that it’s okay to ask for help and take advice. It becomes clear that other people can help you to do better next time or stretch to the next level.
Teach your child resilience and self-discipline.
A growth mindset feeds resilience. Stress is inevitable—and we all need practice at getting back on task when it’s hard. You don’t want your child to feel the stress of competition for the first time in a workplace.
Teach your child independence.
It’s important that the competitive situations your child enters foster independent action. Your child needs to listen to the coach and play an assigned role—but also come up with her own plans.
A competitive situation will give her benchmarks and feedback. Ideally, if your child is a follower by nature, teachers and coaches will push her to try something new she’s thought of herself.
Boys, in particular, sometimes have trouble in school because they are physically restless, competitive, or want to do their own thing. Competition can get them engaged.
Teach your child to face fear.
We also need to learn how to keep our cool and perform when things get intense. If your child is always worried about failure, he won’t grow.
In competitions, students can learn to recognize the physical signs of anxiety as positive—excitement rather than fear–and then take risks as they compete. The post-fear high is exhilarating and pushes them to experiment with new challenges.
In Psyched Up, a book based on interviews with athletes, soldiers, entertainers, and others, journalist Daniel McGinn reveals some of their techniques for peak performance—for example, finding meaningless rituals that will prime you more reliably than a last-minute rehearsal.
Competitions give your children a forum to learn the techniques that work best for them.
Teach your child good judgment.
Much of life is frightening, but if we learn to evaluate risk, we can decide if the prize is worth it. May competitions require students to calculate when to take a chance—and when not to. This is an invaluable lesson in the teenage years when many kids are drawn to the excitement of risk and lack judgment.
They need to learn that calculated risk-taking can be a good thing—but taking dumb risks isn’t. A huge risk like driving too fast on a dark rainy highway isn’t worth the very temporary prize of impressing a date or getting home sooner.
Help your child develop lifelong interests.
Competitions can help your child learn what areas motivate him most. There are competitions to promote skills in math and science, problem-solving, design, entrepreneurship, and more.
Help your child redirect natural competitiveness.
Unstructured competition can have harmful results. Many boys and girls now spend big parts of every day on electronic media playing violent games and seeking social attention, both competitive activities.
There is plenty of evidence that social media affects the self-esteem of teen girls, especially Your anxious daughter may worry about her body because she is, perhaps without fully understanding her motives, competing for attention from boys or seeking membership in a group of socially successful girls.
Similarly, boys can be nasty to each other during team gaming, and there’s evidence that lots of gaming lead to more impulsive behavior, including violence. One study found that male video game players who lost their games became especially nasty to the female players.
Those observations aren’t arguments against the competition in itself. But competitiveness needs to be channeled towards useful skills and pro-social behavior. Formal competition gives adults a way to guide and structure young people to compete in positive ways.
A version of this story appears at Your Care Everywhere.