Connor Beaton describes racing a boy twice: letting him win, then beating him. The tantrum that followed became a lesson that losing doesn't make you bad. Boys need to learn to accept loss gracefully, or they grow into fragile adults who expect to win everything.
He says he wants to race, but what he really wants is to win. And so we raced the first time and I let him win. And then we raced the second time and I won and he threw a tantrum. Hey, like, we're not trying to win right now. We are trying to learn. And so it like helped him conceptualize, I'm not bad. Nothing's wrong with me. It's okay to lose. It's okay to fail. Like, I really see that in boys of like, I have to prove my worth.
It's testosterone. It's testosterone. It's just instinctive. And you cannot smash it out of the boy. We have to just teach him to gracefully lose at times and gracefully be rejected and not throw a tantrum when he's 25, right? Because he's not going to fall apart every time he loses, right? What is fragility? You fall apart every time there is an obstacle. So that he doesn't presume he's entitled to always winning the top prize.
How to Raise Strong, Unshakable Boys in Today's Culture, with Dr. Shefali Tsabary
