Winners and Losers

Darwin loves to win all the time and he gets very upset when he doesn’t. I wonder if this is more of a common thing nowadays? It needn’t be, but maybe we don’t know what it’s like to win any more? In competition surely there’s more often than not more losers than winners, but the old saying ‘it’s the taking part that counts’ doesn’t seem to apply anymore. In my day there was only one winner at pass the parcel, now everyone’s a winner. And maybe this is why Darwin gets so upset whenever he loses, because he simply isn’t used to not winning?

Often I will let Darwin win things but I’m quite diplomatic about it. I don’t want him to win at everything, that’s not natural, and throughout life he won’t win at everything, but when he does win he’ll feel the beauty of glory. Competition is natural and good and I think it’s played an important part of our evolution.

The other night Darwin and I were playing Connect 4 and I wasn’t going to let him win, that was an agreed proviso to me playing it. Imagine my surprise when on the 3rd game he genuinely beat me. He was ecstatic.

We went to his sports day the other week too. Obviously there are no official losers here either. (Un-officially there was. Piggy and I did the parent and child race and we won. Max did cross the line first but he wasn’t attached to a parent, ergo he was disqualified even though that disqualification happened in my head!)

And then, if one race wasn’t enough I was made to do the 400m! Jeeeesussss Christtttt.