Curbing the Competitive Nature in Him

The more I get to know and love my son, the more I like to think he is similar to me in many ways.  But there is one thing about Toby that is a NOT like me; Toby is the most COMPETITIVE person I have ever met. He always has to be the first one dressed, bathed, up the stairs, down he stairs, in the car - -you name it!  He has to be first. If we take two cars somewhere he asks who is going to drive away first and demands to be in that car.   When we watch sports he always cheers for the team that is going to win.  At the dinner table his apples fight with his peas over who is going to get eaten first.  It is NEVER ENDING and INCREDIBLY monotonous to someone who doesn’t give a hoot about sports or rankings.

  Rob and I have seen this innate sense of competition in him, but didn’t realize just how bad it was until Rob innocently won a game of memory with him a few weeks back.  The temper tantrum that ensued was earth shattering.  His jaw froze with a wail so intense it was initially silent.  As his lips turned purple and his eyes began to bulge his tight little fists grabbed the table in a death grip. I wasn’t sure EXACTLY what sound was going to finally come out of him and we just all sat there in complete wonder as we awaited the verdict.  Even Mia, too, was awestruck by it.  And then the silence broke – game pieces were scattered across the floor, chairs were overturned, tears flooded the floor and the walls shook with the sound of his heartbroken wail.

I burst out laughing. 

It was, quite honestly, the most ridiculous thing I’d ever witnessed

After Rob felt it was safe to let me out of my impromptu time-out, Toby had settled into a low grade sobbing with the occasional stuttering, “I…. LOST (sniff sniff)…at…. Memory…and…Daddy (sniff sniff)…. BEAT ME!!!!!! WAAAAAHHHHH”

I think you get the gist.

Ever since then we have tried our hardest to curtail this innate need to win with measured lessons in “coming in second” and daily reminders of fairness and sportsmanship.  Some days, depending on my morning energy level, I even let Mia brush her teeth before him. (!!)  We are making (slow) progress.

But as we approach the start of Toby’s first ever soccer season, we’ve had to kick up our efforts into high gear.

Toby is a sports and (in particular) soccer FANATIC.  He would play soccer 24 hours a day if we let him.  Most of the time he is forced to play with is imaginary friends but those games are just as “intense” as real games and I am constantly being updated on the score, who scored what goal and the distribution of yellow cards.  My great fear is that he is going to bring this intensity with him to his first soccer game this weekend and scare the crap out of every other 4 year old on the field.

AND his coaches.

And so I bought Toby a new book.  It is called “Harold P. Wigglebottom Learns about Sportsmanship.”

It is a story about some sort of animal that is really a human (you know the kind…I think this one is a dog) who loves soccer and is REALLY good at it but is OBSESSED with winning.  (Sound familiar?)  It details a particularly ridiculous tantrum (no, I have not plagiarized the plot of this book in the opening part of my blog) and then talks about a soccer game in which Harold gets kicked out for being unsportsmanlike.  Finally his coach puts him back in and he is given he opportunity to score the winning goal but passes to a friend instead.  The friend doesn’t make the shot and the other team ends up winning but Harold (miraculously) doesn’t care and is, in fact, PROUD of his 2^nd place trophy because he was a GOOD SPORT.  (It is SUCH an unrealistic story and OBVIOUSLY not written by anyone who has ever met a kid who has the innate gene for competition like Toby…but that’s beside the point)

Toby listened very intently to this story.  His mesmerization and intense concentration reminded me of my initial reaction to Einstein’s theory of relativity; it shattered everything I had known was constant about the universe and challenged my brain to think in another dimension.  I suspect this notion of “NOT WINNING” had a similar effect on Toby’s brain.

At the end of the story I gave him a few seconds to digest things and then asked him what he had learned from the story.

“Well…”Toby said very slowly and precisely…”I learned…that…. the final score was THREE to TWO and that the BLUE team won!”

It seems we still have a wee bit of work to do…