We live in a competitive society and sometimes we get carried away with wanting to win. In life we always want to achieve and succeed - we want to be better than what we are, to beat the other person in a race, or to get the position that someone else does. Our children feel these emotions too, however they feel them at a heightened rate.

Parents need to understand that coming first is always a sign of succes. The effort and practice to get there is often unrecognised.

It is also important for us to keep in mind that, from the point of view of child development, the philosophy of Vince Lombardi (“Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing”) is profoundly wrong and teaches exactly the wrong lesson.

It is much more than winning that makes competition an important socialising experience. Children should learn the importance of teamwork and cooperation, of commitment to others and respect for our opponents, and especially, learning to play by the rules. Although they may sometimes seem arbitrary to children, rules are there for a reason. We need to demonstrate these reasons to our children.

Children don’t have the emotional intelligence to deal with losing and not winning. It is up to us as adults to teach them how to be a good loser.

At St Paul’s we have created a poster which children will be educated in how to be a good winner and how to be a good loser.

We want to work in partnership with the parents in educating the students about how to work with their emotions and to teach them skills about how to be a better sport.

We need to praise children on their efforts, to model good sportsmanship and behaviours, to help them understand their feelings and how to deal with their anger, to let them know that it’s ok to lose a game and not always win, to ignore their behaviours and to practice being a graceful winner.

This will take time. The neural pathways will be formed for children through practice. The knowledge of this will come from understanding and this understanding will only occur if we work together and model positivity towards procedures.

Through SPB4L, we model, practice and explicitly teach and revisit what we expect of the children. Therefore, over the next two weeks we are asking parents to work in partnership with the teachers and to work together in making our students good winners and good losers - therefore gracious in defeat.