Tiny Grass

Before we left for Costa Rica, we were playing Uno and Yahtzee pretty often at home. Sometimes M was really happy and complimentary when he lost and other times he was a REALLY sore loser. Unfortunately, losing happened more frequently, and he seemed to get really worked up about winning and would often change or attempt to change the rules to aid his cause. I sometimes lost on purpose and did my best to model good behavior. Games can be fun, they can exercise the mind, they can be social - there are lots of good reasons to play games. I’m not keen on promoting the fact that the sole purpose of a game is for one person to be the winner and to lord it over everyone else.

But he he seemed to get competitive about drawing or building with Lego and other activities. At the last Unschoolers Support Group another parent pointed out that younger kids may need the finite, black and white resolution. That makes sense, but I wondered if there was anything different. I was, for most of my life, hypercompetitive, and I do hope that he doesn’t follow that path. Not being judged and compared to others based on grades for years on end should help, but I needed to find something that expanded the horizons and started searching online. I thought I could find a game whose object wasn’t to win, but to my pleasant surprise, I discovered a game genre called Co-Operative games, where the goal is to work together. This was better than I could have imagined. Read more »