Is losing good for you? It's an interesting question. Consider Ashley Merryman's article; an excerpt is below:
In life, “you’re going to lose more often than you win, even if you’re good at something,” Ms. Twenge told me. “You’ve got to get used to that to keep going.”
When children make mistakes, our job should not be to spin those losses into decorated victories. Instead, our job is to help kids overcome setbacks, to help them see that progress over time is more important than a particular win or loss, and to help them graciously congratulate the child who succeeded when they failed. To do that, we need to refuse all the meaningless plastic and tin destined for landfills. We have to stop letting the Trophy-Industrial Complex run our children’s lives.
This school year, let’s fight for a kid’s right to lose.
A reason the article captures our eyes is that in the transfer into MUS, boys must learn to adjust to a competitive environment. Adjusting to middle school academics, athletics, and social maturity is daunting for most, and as adults we can remember back to those dark days of the anxiety and the awkward scenarios we often encountered. And when we do so, we can remember what we learned through our losses because our losses were legion!
While we may have won some things either as individuals or through our teams, we still lost. We experienced setbacks, academic scores below our elementary scores, athletic struggles when we used to be more a part of the victors, and maybe even our popularity hit rough patches in middle school.
If we pause to think about it, those tough times often made us stronger as we learned what life was really requiring of us, that we needed to gird our loins in the face of challenging terrain and muscle up in order to push through. And we did. Now, as generally well-adjusted adults, we can say that "we're fine."
We think that's exactly Ms. Merryman's point. So, as our children struggle to experience the difficulties that life presents, something that we adults know all too well, we must allow the young the space that was afforded to us so that they now, in turn, can themselves grow to become resilient, self-reliant, and strong.
That's the big idea of this place: graduate able-bodied boys of sound mind and spirit...boys who won't be surprised when life's curve-balls brush past them, and the inevitable losses come their way. Our boys should be those who have learned how to get back up from such circumstances and prepare to fight again, not fold.