There is no denying that my eldest child is competitive.
Fiercely competitive.
The kind which makes for a future Olympic-Gold-Medal winner – competitive.
She needs to be first. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that she is the oldest, but I suspect it is just part of her genetic make up.
Her father has the same drive to always do better than the rest, to drive himself towards new goals, to be better, faster, to force his body into running a marathon and to try to improve his time again and again and again. And he is willing to suffer for it, to endure muscle cramps, to run until his energy levels have been completely depleted and he is more dead than alive.
I’m not like that, neither is n°2. We are happily just pottering about, going about our business and we will get there in the end. So what if it takes us hours, weeks or months. So what if we don’t finish first. We ran, didn’t we? We did our part. Besides I do not like discomfort, mentally or physically.
Like so many characteristics, my daughter’s competitiveness is a two sided sword.
It is what drove her to learn how to ride a bike without training wheels in just two days, simply because a boy in her class could do it and if that boy could do it then there was no reason why she shouldn’t be able to as well.
It got her out of diapers so quickly simply because her friend was also potty training and she wanted to be first.
But there is a downside as well. Being only four, she aims to be first in just about everything she does. And I really do mean e-ve-ry-thing . Whether it is rolling in the dust, dressing herself, putting olives on a pizza, eating said pizza, learning how to count to 20, spelling out her own name AND that of mommy, to her it is a competition. She will try to ‘win’ at it, do a victory dance when she ‘wins’ and be inconsolable when she doesn’t.
There have been many conversations about how winning is nice but not so important that you need to bawl your eyes out when some other kid takes the prize and that she cannot always be first. That is OK not to always win, not to be top in everything and that there are some things, that I’m sorry my dear darling, you will not be able to do.
This – I have to admit – will be a though lesson for her to learn. And she will have to learn it, otherwise she’ll be a pill-popping, nervous wreck by the time she is 16.
And she will have to find a way to turn that competitiveness into something positive.
But there is the glitch in the whole affair. How will she learn?
Through experience? Will it just click one day? Will she simply just realize that she is not musical (she has inherited my signing voice, which sounds like a chorus of warthogs high on helium), that she cannot really jump that high. Will she be sad, will she cry, will she regret it her whole life or… will she just simply accept. Accept that yes, she sucks at music, dancing, mathematics, but hey, she has a knack for drawing awesome portraits and makes a killer brownie, so what the heck …
How did you or your child come to terms with the fact that there is something that you or s/he just is not good at?
This is an original post to World Moms Blog from our mother of two in Belgium, Tantrums and Tomatoes.
Tinne from Tantrums and Tomatoes
Born in Belgium on the fourth of July in a time before the invention of the smart phone Tinne is a working mother of two adorably mischievous little girls, the wife of her high school sweetheart and the owner of a black cat called Atilla. Since she likes to cook her blog is mainly devoted to food and because she is Belgian she has an absurd sense of humour and is frequently snarky. When she is not devoting all her attention to the internet, she likes to read, write and eat chocolate. Her greatest nemesis is laundry.
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Great post, Tinne! I am a firstborn child and so is my husband. I think I used to take everything as a competition, needed to be first and the best. I still have that drive. But somewhere deeper, there is this part of me that wants to be quiet and just let things take their time. My first born daughter is also like that: driven to the point where it is difficult for her to accept that she doesn’t come first. My second daughter is pretty happy with letting things happen in the time they should happen. I always woder how much of this is parenting and how much is genetics! We seem to be the most strickt with firborns, maybe out of their need to pelase their parents they become too driven and to compete in everything? Who knows!
My son will be 21 in January and my daughter 18 in May 2014.
SHE is the super-competitive, driven one (although my son was an extremely sore loser when he was little, with the result that nobody liked playing with him)!
I also feel that part of this is genetic. What seems to help with my daughter is allowing her to “vent” and then reassuring her that her dad and I are super proud of her, that we love her unconditionally and that it really makes no difference in the grand scheme of things whether she is top of her grade or not!
I hope this helps. 🙂
There is so much truth here, Tinne. I am a firstborn – a raging one! We are like that. I am the child of two firstborns – well a firstborn and an only, who are like super-firstborns. My grandparents were all firstborns. Wow, right? I am married to a firstborn and our daughter is an only. So…yeah.
That competitiveness is such a part of our little one’s personality, too, and sometimes it’s frightening. The ambition and drive can be positive, but can that drive to be best produce negative issues in relationships. Hard to know what to do, isn’t it?
The Hub and I try to celebrate our daughter’s “wins” and successes, but have always made a point – especially now that she’s in school and interacts with more kids – to emphasize her efforts, not her results. And this is a good practice not only with the winning and being first issue but also with her internal and personal competitiveness. She does not like to “fail” at things (know that dance well…). So we focus not on whether she got her entire math paper correct, but how well she thinks problems through; not on whether she read a book perfectly, but how willing she is to try new words and sound them out. As teachers, we’ve seen all too often how kids end up when the only thing praised is the winning result.
Life isn’t always full of success, but failure isn’t always a bad thing. I think kids – and adults – have to learn how to focus on the positive efforts we make, not the end results.
Great post!
My oldest son is 8 years old and fiercely competitive. For us, the best strategy has been to let him try as much as he can so he can find the things he is good at, which lessens the blow with the things he is not. He is settled now nicely into an accelerated academic program, piano and karate. He has made wonderful advances in these areas, and he know he does them well. But we also have so many teary-eyed experiences getting here with group sports and other activities. I find while he still cares a whole heck of a lot if he isn’t tops in everything he tries, he can handle it better since he knows he it tops in something. And truth be told, I want him to strive to do his best…but as long as it’s in a healthy, growth-oriented way. Good luck to you!