Is Competition Good for Kids?

There are pros and cons when young people participate in competitive situations such as sports. Here's what you should know about the main pluses.

Help your child learn to collaborate

In team-based competitions, children need to communicate and work together. The fact that they will face another team competitively can make them better collaborators. A good deal of evidence supports the benefits of team sports, in particular.  

In a study with more than 11,200 U.S. kids aged 9 to 13,  researchers found that children involved in team sports like basketball and soccer were less likely to have signs of anxiety, depression, withdrawal, social problems, and attention problems.

Compared to children who didn’t play in a team sport, the team players had 17 percent less difficulty socially, in measures based on parents’ responses.

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Help your child learn that other people think differently

The team players may have had less difficulty socially because they had practice in cognitive empathy, which is understanding how others think. Many competitive activities require young people to anticipate what other people may do in response to their actions (for example, the team’s success in scoring or defending the opposing team). The first step is putting themselves in the other person’s shoes.  

Help your child see their strengths and weaknesses

To compete well over time, your child’s needs to recognize his or her strengths and weaknesses and those of teammates or rivals.  

Young people compare themselves to others to judge their strengths and find self-esteem outside of the home. Social status becomes paramount. Their most socially successful peers may influence them, but it is helpful if they evaluate performance and have heroes in other areas. Competitions are a way to direct your child to admire skills, talent, and expertise.

Help your child find role models

To quote the Institute of Competition Sciences, “We know that Lebron James is an expert at basketball because of his ridiculously high numbers of shots, rebounds, blocks, and ultimately wins. Without the competition to showcase his skills, would our students still be able to recognize him as a hero they aspire to?”  

In the same way, competitions can direct students to admire their peers who work hard and have measurable success, rather than students who experiment with drugs or drive fast.

Help your child celebrate success at all stages

Parents and teachers may be concerned that competitions make some students feel like losers and crush their ambition. But it depends upon how the competition is designed. A well-designed competition includes recognition and celebrations of achievements along the way. Simply making it to the final round becomes a big achievement.

Teach your child to seek growth

Seeing mistakes or failures as an opportunity to learn and improve is a valuable skill in many areas of life. Competitions make this concrete. They provide benchmarks. If you lose one game or race, you come back to play another round differently.

Along the way, your child ideally will learn that it’s okay to ask for help and take advice. It becomes clear that other people can help you to do better next time or advance to the next level.

Teach your child resilience and self-discipline

A growth mindset feeds resilience. Stress is inevitable. We all need practice at getting back on task when it’s hard. It’s good to fail if a child tries to learn from it. Failure can be motivation to achieve future success. You don’t want your child to feel the stress of competition for the first time in a workplace or when they may not get the job they want. Life is built on learning from failures.

Teach your child independence

It’s important that competitive situations into which your child enters foster independent action. Your child needs to listen to the coach and play an assigned role but also come up with her own plans. A competitive situation will give her benchmarks and feedback. Ideally, if your child is a follower by nature, teachers and coaches will push her to try something new she’s thought of herself.

Boys, in particular, sometimes have trouble in school because they are physically restless, competitive, or want to do their own thing. A competition can get them engaged.

Teach your child to face fear

We also need to learn how to keep our cool and perform when things get intense. If your child is always worried about failure, he won’t grow. In competitions, students can learn to recognize the physical signs of anxiety as positive, turning them into excitement rather than fear of learning to take risks as they compete. The post-fear high is exhilarating and pushes them to experiment with new challenges.  

In “Psyched Up,” a book based on interviews with athletes, soldiers, and entertainers, journalist Daniel McGinn reveals some of their techniques for peak performance — for example, finding rituals that will prime you more reliably than a last-minute rehearsal.

Competitions give your children a forum to learn the techniques that work best for them.

Teach your child good judgement

Much of life is frightening, but if we learn to evaluate risk we can decide if the prize is worth it. Many competitions require students to calculate when to take a chance — and when not to.

This is an invaluable lesson in the teenage years, when many kids are drawn to the excitement of risk and lack judgment. They need to learn that calculated risk-taking can be a good thing, and that taking dumb risks isn’t.

A huge risk like driving too fast on a dark rainy highway isn’t worth the very temporary prize of impressing a date or getting home sooner.

Help your child develop lifelong interests

Competitions can help your child learn what areas motivate him most. There are competitions to promote skills in math and science, problem solving, design, entrepreneurship, and more.  

Help your child redirect natural competitiveness

Unstructured competition can have harmful results. Boys and girls now spend big parts of every day on electronic media playing violent games and seeking social attention, both competitive activities.  

Plenty of evidence shows that social media affects the self-esteem of teen girls, especially. Your anxious daughter may worry about her body because she is, perhaps without fully understanding her motives, competing for attention from boys or seeking membership in a group of socially successful girls.  

Similarly, boys can be nasty to each other during team gaming, and there’s evidence that lots of gaming leads to more impulsive behavior, including violence. One study found, for example, that male video game players who ended up losing their games became especially nasty to female players.

Those observations aren’t arguments against competition in itself. But competitiveness needs to be channeled towards useful skills and pro-social behavior. Formal competition gives adults the opportunity to guide and structure young people to compete in positive ways.  

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