"If at first you don't succeed, keep on sucking till you do succeed." (Jerome Lester Horvitz, aka Curly Howard)

It's nice to teach children that trying your best and good sportsmanship are what's most important in playing a sport, which is absolutely true, but the practice of not keeping score delivers some bad messages.

It turns out, for instance, that performance does matter.  Oh, but we don't want children to feel that they've lost, as this might hurt their delicate self-esteem.  Really, is that the way life works?   Everybody wins and everybody's a winner?   It's easy to be a good winner, and hard to be a good loser.  The latter is a very valuable skill, and being able to accept and learn from defeat is critical. It also develops skills in "picking one's battles," assessing cost-benefit, developing priorities and strategizing, and so much more, including having a grasp of reality. 

And sometimes it's OK to let a kid know that what they did wasn't great. Of course you'd never yell at or criticize a kid for making a bad play. (Hear that, win-at-all-cost coaches? And by the way, they're playing, not you, and it's just a game.)  These are "teaching opportunities," and "Nice try" is fine, but let's not go over the top in complimenting every little thing. Most people develop the ability to differentiate between a deserved compliment and a specious one.  For some, praise becomes meaningless, as do consequences, because whatever you do is great, so why try hard to do something great since you'll get complimented/rewarded regardless of outcome?  Ice cream for everybody!

And guess what, we're all the same but we're not all the same.  Some people/kids are smarter, more athletic, more popular, and more and less of a lot of things.  Learning that there's always somebody that's better than you  on some dimensions will avoid some of the Deadly Sins later and let you be content with who you are and happy for others' successes.  And in some cases, though you "deserve" better, life can be unfair, so learning this when the stakes are very low (e.g., ref's/ump's bad call) will make the road ahead much smoother.  I see enough people, especially the younger ones, with a lack of responsibility and a sense of entitlement.  Mommy won't always fix it, or as the Eagles say in one of my favorite songs (Get Over It): 

You don't want to work; you want to live like a king
But the big, bad world doesn't owe you a thing

We want to protect our children, but in doing so we sometimes do them a disservice.  I see a lot of people that have not really learned many of the lessons of sports.  They do not know how to lose, do not understand or accept the consequences of their actions, have a sense of entitlement, are not empathetic to those less fortunate, etc. There are winners and losers, better and worse, and gently teaching a child to have the courage to put oneself out there when one might fail or look foolish is a precious gift.  

"Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, And---which is more---you'll be a Man, my son!" 

[Rudyard Kipling]

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