Sorry! Do you let your kids win to build their confidence?

At a recent visit to a friends house we decided to pull out the game Sorry and play.  If you have never played Sorry you really should give it a try.  It is a very simple, fast game which makes it great for young players.  The goal is to take your four pieces from their home to the finish line.  You do this by picking a card on your turn and following the directions.  Some cards move you forward and some move you backward.  But there are a few Sorry cards in the deck and when you choose that card you get to take the place of any other player and send them back to their home starting point.  This can create a great advantage for you but it is pretty brutal for the person who gets sent home.

So we pulled out the game and looked around at each other and realized that each one of us was wearing a different color tshirt that matched the colors of the pieces of the game.  So we decided that if you were wearing yellow then you would play as the yellow pieces etc.

The game was clicking right along until suddenly it became clear that my friend was being super easy on her daughter.  Finally, when my friend picked a Sorry card and her daughter was the only player with an open piece out on the board this dilemma reached critical mass.  There were no other players to pick on.  Everyone else had their players in their home spot or past the finish line already and so my friend's only choice was to swap out her piece for her daughter's piece and send her daughter back to her home.  She hesitated clearly trying to figure out what to do.

I said "Oh C'mon! We are playing Sorry! Not I have to let my daughter win!"  And then I realized that those words actually came out of my mouth.  I hadn't just thought them in my head.  I had actually blurted that out.  And then my friends daughter started to giggle.  She totally knew what her mom was up to and she was using it to her advantage.

It made me think "What are we teaching our kids when we let them win.  And what are we teaching our kids when we let them win and they know we are letting them win?"

Perhaps my kids picked up on my competitive vibe but they have always asked me to be challenge them right back from the time they were very little.  When my oldest was six years old he asked me to not use phrases like "Good Job." He wanted to know what it was specifically that he did well.  He told me that there was nothing he could do with "Good Job" - he didn't know what to do with that.  It didn't give him any information.  So, we did our best to be specific with our kids about what they did well and what they could do better.

The kids also learned quickly that a true win was soooo much more rewarding that a win that had been handed to them.  We love playing card games together and one of our favorite games is "I doubt it." There are other names for this game but for this blog "I doubt it" will do.  The first time we played the game with the entire family the youngest kid walked away with big win.  This delighted him but we all figured it was beginners luck.  But after playing this game several times and having him win every single time we started to realize that there was an element of skill that he was applying to the game.  This victory of his has been a real confidence builder.  As the youngest kid to walk away from the game leaving all of your older siblings in a dazed and amazed state is really something.

Chime in: Do you let your kids win?  What do you think about games and self confidence?  Join the conversation on Facebook.com/stayathomemomcommunity or Gplus.to/Stayathomemom