Competition

As we pulled into a parking space at the mall, I couldn’t believe my ears: my three year old in the back seat sang out “nah, nah our van is bigger than yours” to the car next to us. I know that some of this is just life with siblings, but I do worry that our youngest child is being warped by the micro-competitions happening all day, every day of his life, who gets to the van first, who gets buckled in first, who is first at everything from getting dressed in the morning to brushing teeth at night. Worse, is the anxious gracelessness of his five year old brother calling out, “It’s not a race” if it’s close, and then racing anyway and “I won!” So our family motto seems to be “It’s not a race unless Søren is winning.”

I worry I encouraged this because it was so useful at first to get the kids moving when nothing else would make them move along — innocently, at bedtime, it was “Let’s see if we can get ready before the timer goes off.” But then beating your brother can be so much more satisfying than beating a timer.

I am not sure how to instill better sportsmanship. I try to model it, of course, easy as it is to start comparing free rice scores, I lose frequently and with pleasure at scrabulous, where it is fun to watch other people playing better than I do, I think that marks a change in my own ability to enjoy games with detachment from the competition. My husband, of course, would say I am still competitive. We disagree about whether it is ok to beat a 5 year old at tic-tac-toe (I insist that this is how he learns and I don’t do it on days when he cries easily). Also, I am married to someone who used to worry about other kids’ feelings and make sure they won at tetherball on the playground. And I love that about him. Just like I love that my older kids did chess club last year without ever getting particularly competitive — they liked thinking about strategy, and came up with creative variations, but didn’t particularly seem to care about winning.

The difference between me and my husband is one I used to attribute to birth order (I am first of two, he is third of three) and our first-born does seem a little more driven to win, while our second wavers between jockeying for position with his older brother and a native generosity and awareness of everyone else’s feelings that really cuts the bloodlust. And of course, sometimes, in some games, he just has given up, knowing when it’s a game he cannot win at and refuses to play. Which I think is an important thing for his brother to learn, that games have their own homeostatic balance, that they have to be interesting, that everyone has to feel they have a chance.

Of course, being who I am I have to think about what competition means. And when my two younger guys are racing for the car, with an emotional investment that seems out of proportion to who gets to the car first, I suspect that they are jostling also for esteem, for position in the family, for something that there just doesn’t seem to be enough of for both of them (please let this not be my attention!). And that is what competition at all sorts of levels seems to be about, some scarcity, something you want at a cost to someone else — whether it is a place in an elite school or college, a position in a company, or rank in the family. As a family, we love games, but I am realizing how much I am growing, as I appreciate that the part of the game I love is the interesting part and not the part where there is room for just one winner.