Training children on games

Training and initiating children to take up games or sports, especially competitive is an art in itself.

Some children have an innate talent for certain sports (and not others) while others won't. Sport is seldom taught for them to excel in it, but more so they developed the skills to collaborate and develop healthy competitiveness in a social environment.

But what one wouldn't want is the child losing  interest in the game due to many losses early on. Or worse, lose confidence and self-belief in his ability to succeed in social dealings.

Here the parent or coach should play a guiding role. Initially, find out the child's calibre. Then, make him play with others lower in calibre so that the child wins and develops interest and confidence. The parent/ coach could even themselves play with the child and deliberately lose the overall game. But one may win some points all the while teaching the child the mistake he made due to which he lost the point.

The fact that he overall could still win the game will instill confidence. And prod himself to improve and try harder.

As the child thus nurtured in basic and core abilities is then exposed to peers of similar calibre and made to taste an equal number of victories and defeats, he learns to take defeats in the stride and deal with them in a balanced manner.

The child's training can stop at this point unless he has the interest to continue training further, or has the talent needed for going to national/international levels of the game.

If not, even then the coach has done his job and apart from teaching the rules of the game and the techniques of how to play it, he has instilled life- skills in the child for how to deal with social / professional settings involving a mix of success and failures.