8 year olds

8 year olds

I was involved in an interesting conversation recently that I wanted to share with you. If you have been following my posts, you know that I believe children, especially the young ones, need time to develop in a safe, positive, and nurturing environment. (And so do Pediatricians) We here at Frozen Shorts believe that children under the age of 12 should not keep score all the time, or get trophies. Let them play for fun. The competition will come naturally if patience is applied and rewarded. There is a mountain of medical and psychological evidence to back this up that says free play is a great and needed way for children to develop both mentally and physically.

Children learn by internal realization, not external force. By stressing winning and keeping score, adults put the cart before the horse, and eventually, the hoarse gets tired and quits.

This guy I was talking with, along with others, was insistent that kids wanted to keep score, needed to keep score, and that was enough justification to keep score. He cited the fact that kids he coached new the score days and even weeks after they played a game. Another guy chipped in that I obviously knew nothing about children, even though I have coached, mentored, and worked with well over 5,000 of them. The first guy made some great points about parents butting in, and putting too much stress on kids, but he wouldn’t let the score thing go.

No matter what I said to this man, he would not change his stance.

Now let me be clear. We are talking about second graders. If you have been in a second grade classroom and taught, as I have, and my wife is teaching now, you would know getting them to stand together in line is an accomplishment. Now I have run into some children who do want to keep score, in my experience, they do not do it in a positive way. They Lord it over the other kids, as do some of their parents. It is not healthy or productive.

When I mentioned pickup games he said that he always wanted to have the best player on his team. Where I grew up we always wanted the teams to be equal so the competition became the goal not the score. In basketball we kept score because the winner stayed in and played the next game. But I couldn’t tell you what the score was in any of these games. We just tried harder because we wanted to keep playing as did the other team. If there were only 6 of us we just played winners out.

Here is a quote from him “Cause even at 8-10 years old losing sucks.”  In my experience, kids pick their friends to be on their teams. 10 minutes after a game is done, if parents aren’t butting in and reminding them of the score, how they played, and why they sucked, the kids forget all about the game, as they have for generations before them.

I say this repeatedly. Take the age group you are coaching and take the kids out of this adult orientated structured pay for play and put them in a classroom setting of age appropriate learning where they are interested in the subject being taught to them. See what they think is important, how they learn, what they want to do to get better, and how they are taught. You will find it has nothing to do with the score of a test unless they are constantly reminded about the upcoming test.

Amada Visek, an assistant professor in the department of exercise science, recently conducted a study of 1,000 children. She found “winning” ranked 48^th amongst the children as a reason they played youth sports. What did the kids value most? The top three were good sportsmanship, trying hard, and positive coaching.

As I have said many times before, no one knows how to win. No one knows how to teach winning. And no one really knows what winning means.

Play for fun!!!