After attending our small village carnival two things became immediately apparent: kids will have fun together no matter what they are wearing & Esteban doesn’t like musical chairs! Before I get to the importance of the latter I would like to share with you a few shots from the day.
Esteban & Luna were both pretty excited to try on their new clothes…
Luna had a good old laugh at Esteban when his outfit was complete.
In case you were wondering, I didn’t buy a costume but did have a little fun with Sabraina’s eyeliner.
Esteban is particularly into pretend cooking at the moment and wanted to take his vegetables with him to the carnival. Sorry buddy. Not this time.
It was the perfect blue day as we made our way from our new home down to the parade.
Team Stonehill ready for action…
I have to be honest, the parade itself didn’t excite me too much. We basically just walked as a group from the outskirts of the village to the town hall where all the kids were given sugared treats and told to play a game. This post is not about sugar, but I will ask you to ponder for one moment why we would knowingly brainwash our children to believe sugar is okay? More addictive than cocaine it is one of the leading causes of disease today.
Musical Chairs
Such a seemingly innocent game yet what was this strange energy I was feeling for the first time in ages?
We watched for a while as the game was played and Sabrina decided Esteban should have a go…
It was immediately evident that despite Sabrina’s presence next to him, he was not having a good time participating. Which was surprising. I chose to remove him after a few rounds because he looked as if he was about to burst into tears and I realised this was the first time he had been in competition with other children.
What is the message behind competition?
I was reminded in that moment of my own childhood instincts around competitive games: No matter how trivial they appeared I didn’t want to play. Yet I was forced to play… until it felt normal to me.
Call me crazy but are we not subtly imprinting our children with the idea that competition is normal?
We live in a seriously competitive world which is sorely lacking in humans who seek to help & collaborate with others, so why do we normalise the idea of competition from such an early age?
Motivation?
You may believe competition is an important aspect of our society, providing some kind of motivation. Personally I struggle to understand how this kind of motivation is useful. If our primary motivation is to beat others and be the best at something, we will end up living in a world with just a few victors at the top of a pyramid and lots of losers at the other end of the scale…
Hang on… that is exactly the kind of world we are living in!
See the problem?
Kids are very capable of having just as much fun playing games which encourage interaction and working together to achieve a common goal, so perhaps folks it is time for us to stop mindlessly repeating that which was done to us and make conscious decisions around the way our children come to understand the world.
As soon as the game was done Esteban was more than happy to re-join the group and he quickly zoned in on a colourful jester girl to chat with.
When he was done playing with his new friends (in a non competitive manner!) he went to check out his surroundings…
And howled at the mountains to let the world know he had arrived.
Please feel your way into this story with a conscious mind and if you have young kids, watch them and learn from the way they respond to things. They are here to help us and we are here only to safely facilitate their instinctive desire to have as much fun as possible in every moment.
Whenever we compete there must always be a loser. And losing isn’t fun!
I will never stop my children from competing if they feel like it and will never force them to compete if they don’t. I will simply live with an awareness of the bigger picture and always do my best to steer them towards games which encourage collaboration instead of competition.
My love to you all from France :)
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I completely agree. Most of my struggles in school were from a lack of desire to compete with others. I could see that it would bring out some less than flattering aspects about myself and most of the justification for it seemed faulty. First and most importantly there was this idea that it drives progress, but it seemed to turn everyone I knew into mindless drone workers doing things they weren't excited about....wouldn't excitement lead to more progress? Secondly there was this artificial REQUIREMENT for competition that was so easy to see through. I loved sports until I realized how much everyone cared about winning. I wanted to win but I couldn't hate my opponent or want to destroy them like I was encouraged to. With grades, when too many people got A's they made they adjusted the grading to make sure there were losers.
Competition requires losers. If it's a friendly game to push each individual to level up their game, that sounds fine to me, but when livelihood is on the line and we have created the means for abundance already it doesn't make sense. Even with 7 billion people on earth, we have enough resources to make sure everyone has what they need and then some.
I could go on forever but I'll stop here. Thanks for this post. Resteemed.
It's a pretty massive subject hey. I am sure so many of us went through a similar feeling of discomfort when told to compete, but have buried that feeling a long time ago.
I was sent to a boarding school in the UK at age 7 and every aspect of my life was about obedience & competition from that moment on. And if you didn't comply they beat you.
Can't imagine why I feel a strange energy around this now!
I feel particularly grateful however for the way in which having kids is helping me see more clearly who I am. And looking forward to seeing what kind of a person my son will become after experiencing a childhood built not on my rules but on his own intuition :)
Am encouraging him to use watercolour paints at the moment and bless him, he understands that we are painting the water (which is there to clean his brush) while he uses the paper for cleaning his brush. So we are building up a lovely collection of coloured jam jars now... which was not my intention, but why not! I can only imagine how this kind of outside the box thinking would have gone down at my old school. Beat that child immediately!
Maybe you can thank them for beating an aversion to competition into you so deeply that you could talk about it today. I hope to have kids to mess up some day, in the good way. That sounds like something I would have gotten in trouble for, using everything the way it isn't supposed to be used. Eventually he'll get bored of that and really start blowing our minds if you don't stop him, which I'm sure you won't :-D
I agree, competition is not a necessity. While there is always a winner, there are always more than one loser. Why should a child be competing when there is only one pro and so many cons?
I remember an incident when I was about five years old. It was also a competition of sorts. The children were all up on stage, behind a closed curtain, and there were piles of all sorts of clothing. The moms were required to help the children dress up. Some of the moms were busy with other activities and could not help. Nevertheless, the girls and boys around me eagerly got dressed up without their mothers being present. As it was a church thing, my mom could really not help. My father was the pastor, and she had to be by his side.
Anyway...we were new in the community and I had not made friends yet. So there I was, on stage, too shy to move a muscle. Total freeze. I did not get dressed up.
And then the curtain opened. There I was standing, in my light pink crimplene dress and mousy hair, no costume in sight - not even a hat or a scarf. I felt sure that everyone was laughing at me. Of course, one of the brighter children - a more ambitious mother's child - won the prize.
The rest were losers, and I was the biggest loser of them all. The humiliation of that incident is still with me these 40+ years further on.
Just a funny aside: the participants in that competition will not recognize me now! I dress over the top, all the time. My hair is the brightest of red, I wear hats, I wear scarves and boots in the middle of summer. In short, I dress out of the box. If any of my children's friends need something for a fancy dress, they always know they can come and delve in Aunty Riki's cupboard for something quirky. Maybe that competition did something good after all...maybe it shaped a little bit of my identity!
Thank you for sharing your personal story here. There is so much power to holding a positive perspective on past events. Like you I recall particular moments of humiliation which for years made me believe I was somehow less than the other children... but without these moments I suspect I wouldn't be such an objective person today. And I know what it feels like to be humiliated so I am able to recognise the energy keep my kids feeling empowered ;)
Another insightful post with some great classic pictures as well! I agree with you on the point that competition and learning to "beat" another is not a "conscious" mindset. It's part of the old school "programming" handed down through the ages. I feel your children are blessed to have two "conscious minded" parents. It makes a world of difference. :)
Thanks for you message :)
Am so very grateful for the multiple layers of awareness parenting brings with it... should one choose to listen. And grateful too for my own childhood experience in which competition and (pain) punishment was an ordinary part of life... for without this I may not be listening so intently now for the natural, resistance free route to childhood empowerment ;)
Really great post, it really does sadden me when children are forced to do things that are not natural to them. They are born all accepting and then through watching those around them they lose that. This huge divide that so many feel happens at such a young age. We need to be promoting all inclusive activities with no losers or winner's. Being competitive really makes people unhappy, always striving to do better, to be perfect. That becomes the focus in their life and they lose out on so much. We as humans are meant to come together and support one another, not keep playing these games that continue to widen the divide. I always encourage my children to do what makes them happy, and so far they have never wanted to participate in competitive games, that speaks volumes to me. We just have to ask them what they want. Thank you @samstonehill for talking about this.
That's it! We just have to ask them what they want. So simple yet so often overlooked. It was a pleasure to write this one and I feel as if it opens up the door to a much larger story for so many of us :)
motivation is important for your own development. And not just for the race itself. And about playing chairs, seemingly innocent, but the very moment that you and your family are carrying the charging energy that carries a positive charge :)
Motivation is indeed important. No question about that. But if our childhood motivation revolves around being better than the next person, then do we not we fall into a lifetime of comparison and potential unhappiness?
Simply beautiful. I Have a 2 years old kid too and dressing them up for carneval or masquerade is like magic to them.
About competition, Kids always compete and thats good for them because that makes them want to be better.
Keep up the good work.
Kind regards,
Anna, @arhitekt
I feel as if there is a fine line between competition for the sake of fun and competition which creates a feeling of disempowerment. I can imagine two kids racing to see who gets to the other side of the room first... without any sense of competition. But as soon as there is some kind of reward system for the victor, there is a different feeling and the message seems wrong.
I am very conscious of course that my own childhood in which i was forced to compete in everything I did from the age of 7 onwards has created a strong feeling in me which I am still reacting against to a certain extent!
So... let's see what happens as they grow up... and so do I.
All the best to you and your kids :)
I enjoy your posts and appreciate being able to upvote and give you some steem. Visit me at talk2momz if you like encouragement.
With limited internet time at the moment I have little time to do anything except write posts and respond to the messages... but I hope to bump into one of your posts soon ;)
Love this post. As a child, I was also really anxious about the constant competitiveness. Some people may thrive on it, and may even be able to do so in a healthy way, I want to leave that possibility open, but I think it can cause a lot of distress in other people. Particularly kids.
Right? Even if you want to say it has a place, it does not have to be the default of every interaction.
I was listening to Seth Godin's new podcast this week. His episdoe about status roles hits right to the heart of this. We teach are kids that social status matters, and then we reinforce the ways that these high statuses are attained and it is almost always through competition. Seth ponders on some great alternatives.
Thanks for the thought provoking post!