Should I Let My Daughter Beat Me At Mario Kart?
By: Jon Peters
Tags: Children, Advice, Questions, Parenting, Life Lessons

Should I Let My Daughter Beat Me At Mario Kart?

A lesson in parenting from everybody’s favourite Italian plumber.

Ask anyone that’s ever played a game of Monopoly with me, and they’ll tell you how competitive I am. I won’t deny it. On occasion, I’ve been known to take things a little too seriously. It doesn’t matter what the game is, or who I’m playing against, I play to win. What can I say, we all have flaws right? So you can imagine the dilemma I face when I sit down to play Mario Kart with my daughter.

The Apples Didn’t Fall Far From The Tree (But They Fell In First Place!)

I’ve spent a lot of time playing Mario Kart. It should come as no surprise that my children are just as competitive as I am. My son is too young to comprehend what it means to win or lose, but even at two, I can see the competitive streak beginning to emerge. Isabella is six so she very much understands the concept, and has undoubtedly witnessed me getting over-competitive in a game of Scrabble at some point, which won’t have helped matters.

I’ve taken her aside to explain she shouldn’t get upset if she doesn’t win at something, (pot, kettle black anyone?) and that losing isn’t the end of the world.

Can you smell that?

It smells like…hypocrisy.

To Win, Or Not To Win?

To clarify, when we play, I don’t win as a way of demonstrating my skill compared to hers. Metaphorically speaking it’s like watching the Tune Squad going up against the Monstars in Space Jam, without the help of Michael Jordan. No, I win because I am torn between the merits of beating her or letting her win.

I want my children to grow up knowing how good it feels to succeed, even at something as trivial as Mario Kart. That feeling isn’t something I experienced often as a child. But I also want them to grow up with the understanding that there will be times in life when you are not the best singer, or dancer, the most athletically gifted, or most intelligent person in the room.

Nothing would make me happier than to watch her genuinely kick my ass at Mario Kart, the way I did to my Dad when I was a kid. Right now, she can’t. What’s more, is that she knows she can’t. So what do I achieve by letting her win? She receives a false sense of accomplishment, that subconsciously she knows she didn’t earn. By letting her win, am I setting her up to fail later in life when she’s hit with the realisation that in the real world, you won’t succeed just because you want to?

On the other side of that coin, if she loses constantly, it will destroy her motivation. She will feel sad and dejected, something that my natural instinct as a parent tells me to prevent. And yes, while of course I try and explain to her that she won’t always win, all she sees is that she wanted to win at something and she didn’t. She is only six after all.

I don’t want her to grow up thinking that life isn’t fair if she doesn’t succeed, or that something isn’t worth doing if it’s too hard, that you should give up at the first hurdle. I want her to grow up seeing failure for what it really is.

Failure Is Just A Lesson You Learned On The Path To Success.

Think of somebody successful. The list of potential names you could choose is endless. But it doesn’t really matter who you choose. What matters is how you think those individuals got to where they are.

Do you think they achieved their goals on the first attempt? Or the second? Or the third? No. Because the road to success is paved with failures:

Michael Jordan — the greatest basketball player in history, didn’t make his high-school basketball team.

J.K. Rowling — the author of the Harry Potter novels, saw her manuscript for the first novel rejected by twelve publishers before it was eventually published.

publishers before it was eventually published. Walt Disney — was told that he lacked imagination and had no good ideas.

Will Isabella grow up to have the success of the names mentioned above? Not necessarily, but I most certainly hope so.

Regardless of what she goes onto achieve, I want her to achieve it with the attitude that she will succeed as long as she puts her mind to it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s singing, dancing, gymnastics, she can become a professional Mario Kart player for all I care, as long as it makes her happy.

But she needs to know that you won’t always win when it comes to the game of life. She needs to know that you might not win the second time around either. Or the third, or even the hundredth. She needs to learn that if you want something badly enough, you should embrace your failures, learn from them and try again. But for now?

She needs to learn how to keep Princess Peach’s car on the race track.

What are your thoughts? I’d love to hear your opinions.