How to Help Your Child Cope With Losing

ERegistration of your child in sports can help Keep them active, teach them to work with a team, and build their trust. but sports too have the effect of separating the participants into winners and losers what has the potential to evoke some pretty devastating emotions in a child. To help your child To deal with the big emotions that come after losing a highly competitive game, “you want to prepare kids for losing by instilling in them a healthy philosophy of winning —one that doesn’t depend on the score at the end of the game,” he said Frank Schmolla sports psychologist and a collaborator at the Youth enrichment in sport Project offering evidence-based strategies for effective coaching.

To help your child cope with losing, you need to teach them that “You can be successful regardless of the score at the end of the game if you try your best and have done the best you can,” Smoll said. “What more could you ask from an athlete, no matter the level?”

Don’t sugarcoat the loss

If your child just lost a game, you might want to try right away to help them feel better about what happened. Although comforting them may be helpful in the long run, If the pain from the loss is fresh, it’s ‘It’s important to appreciate their feelings. “It does losing hurts,” Smoll said. “You don’t want to sugarcoat it.”

Depending on your child’s personality, they may have different ways of dealing with the immediate effects of a loss. Some children may want comfort, while others may want to be left alone. Some might want to jump right into the post-game analysis, while others might want to wait until they talk about the game.

Stop, watch and listen

If your child has just lost a game and you want to help them come to terms with the loss, Smoll recommends a “stop look list” strategy. “You want to stop focusing on whether the team won or lost. It’s game over,” Smoll said. “Look for signs of how the kids are feeling.” That involves looking at their facial expressions and body language to get a feel for how they do ithandling it. And then: “Listen to what they say before you dominate Let them express themselves,” Smoll said. “Let her speak and then ask some probing questions.”

Focus on the achievements and lessons

Once you’ve had a chance to assess how your child is coping with the loss, then It can be a good time to focus on the aspects of the game that were unrelated to winning or losing the game: things like what they did well Showing athleticism, showing persistence, or trying a new skill they’ve been working on in practice.

“It’s about learning and growing,” says Patrick Cohn, mental performance coach at high-performance sport. “It’s also about teamwork, collaboration, confidence and learning to perform under pressure.”

This can also be a time to talk about what they learned from the loss and what they want to work on for the next game. “Losing gives you a good sense of where you are in terms of your ability,” Smoll said. “There’s something to be gained from winning, and there’s also a lot to be learned from losing if you’re prepared.”