Every day, adults make hundreds of conscious, informed decisions for themselves. Parents make many more.
Choosing for others is overwhelming. I didn’t anticipate many of the decisions I’ll have to take for my son, nor the way they would make me feel.
So, a couple of days ago, when my phone buzzed at 11.45 AM on a Monday, the message I got sent me into a spiral of anxiety.
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The Notification on the Kindergarten Group
The teacher announced there would be a competition next week.
The Formidables — a competition for children as young as three. They would fill in worksheets and see how they score.
Whoever wanted their children to compete had to decide by 2 PM on the same day. Within minutes, parents rushed to confirm.
17 out of 21 said yes to testing their 3–4-year-olds for… formidability.
I sat there feeling inadequate. I didn’t want to get him into the competition.
The good news? Attending wasn’t mandatory. The bad news? I was going to feel bad regardless of the choice.
If 80% of the parents rushed to say yes, am I wrong for saying no?
Image by iStockPhoto.com
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Seeing Competitivity in Small Children for What It Is — Toxic
“Competition is healthy… but there is more to life than winning or we should nearly all be losers.” — Charles Hardy
There are competing views on competition.
It makes life exciting. Yet life’s more about connection than about competition.
When we look at it the wrong way, competition stops leading us to success. It sets us up for failure. It becomes unhealthy as it:
- Forces us to win at the expense of others.
- Alters our self-esteem and sense of self-worth.
When only one can win, each child who enters the competition sees other children as obstacles to their success.
If they want to win, they’ll do it at the expense of others. If they can’t win, their self-esteem and self-worth will be shattered.
And if they come home to their competitive parents? They’ll have to explain why they did “so poorly”.
Do you see how competition can become toxic for small children who measure their success through other people’s lenses?
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The Impact of Competitive Parents on Small Children
Psychologists consider competitiveness a trait.
Research shows some neurons are responsible for our level of competitiveness. They adapt their functionality based on information taken from the social environment and past experiences.
So, both genetics and environment determine our children’s competitiveness.
If the parents are more ambitious, their children are more likely to jump at any competition, even when their success odds are low.
Those kids will go through more competitive experiences and deal with more failures, suffering more dents in their self-esteem.
Still, the idea of competitiveness has huge implications in all aspects of our lives. How we look at it is shaped by how our parents look at us.
We know competitiveness is essential to our development as individuals. It helps us grow personally and professionally.
But we know little about the development of preschool children’s competitiveness.
How about we act a bit more conscious about forcing our little ones to enter competitions from such a young age?
Image by iStockPhoto.com
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How Small Children Feel About Competition
My four-year-old isn’t against competitions — he already won them all.
Neither are the children he’s playing with at the park.
Whenever Matthew’s shouting at the playground “I’m stronger and more powerful than anyone in the world,” they echo back “No, I AM.”
These kids would call themselves formidable if they knew the word.
Days after entering kindergarten, teachers were complaining they have to work hard at teaching them how to share.
Children know how to compete.
They don’t just compete with others, at play or in school, but also with us. At home, when we try to bend their wants and make them fit into our needs and schedules, they fight back.
They take competitiveness as a given.
One of our many tasks as parents is to help them open their eyes and hearts for cooperation. Obviously, without looking to crush their competitive nature.
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Small Children’s Competitions Reflect Adults’ Big Problems
We used to compete with wild animals for food and shelter.
Also, we used to team up with each other to grow stronger and survive.
Now that the animals stay away? Why can’t we live without competition and have to turn against each other?
We compete with the Joneses, as adults. And send our small children to compete too.
Competition is life and it’s our job to toughen up our children, right? Look at Joneses’ kids and how much tougher they seem.
But here’s the thing.
When we’re busy looking at Joneses’ kids and comparing them to our own, we miss the point.
Small children are all formidable. Competitive and self-centered. On a mission to conquer the world. With them, everything is me, me, me.
Yet, they need to learn other things before they can conquer the world. Like the fact that they can’t do it all alone.
So, we send them to kindergarten to practice the social skills all social beings need to learn. Alliance, cooperation, teamwork.
The point?
We need to focus on what small children can do together rather than against each other. Help them learn in an environment that fosters empathy and reveals the best in us.
If we can’t do that, and we’re stuck in comparing children, measuring one against another, and trying to fit them into charts?
Then it means we have some big problems ourselves.
Image by iStockPhoto.com
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When Does Competition Become OK for Our Children?
Competition is useful, to some extent, when we develop healthy coping mechanisms for it.
Forcing children into it at young ages can prove devastating.
We shouldn’t send them to compete with the world before they put on their warm, soothing coat of self-confidence.
We mustn’t throw them into the arena before they know they’re just as worthy and loved whether they are standing up or they have fallen to the ground.
We want to keep our small children away from contests until we’ve forged one big idea into their growing minds, which is that: they are and will remain themselves, regardless of any contest’s results.
“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same”
Competition isn’t bad in itself. But its results depend on:
- How we look at it
- How we encourage our children to look at it
- How ready our children are for competing in a healthy way when they get a chance at competition.
So, I don’t need to test whether or exactly how formidable my son is.
He’ll be one of the four children who won’t participate in this contest, this time.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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