My 4 year old has been signed up to a lot of soccer activities. He loves soccer at the moment and one of his coaches thinks he’s pretty good for a 4 year old, so he is getting to compete with 5-6 year olds on the weekends. It’s half training and half scrimmages for each session, which my son hasn’t ever scrimmaged before.

When we first started going to this session a few weeks ago, my son participated in the training portion first. It was normal and game-based, so he had fun running around. He got placed on a team he will have for the season, so he ended up getting a taste of scrimmaging. Within the first few minutes of the first scrimmage, the other team scored and I could see my son standing there confused because he was so used to “winning” since the training was the coaches vs. the kids (which the coaches lost on purpose for each game). The rest of the game was brutal and some of the kids on the other team were way rougher than my son and his teammates. Lots of pushing to get the ball and not a lot of rules in place to discourage that behavior.

After that first scrimmage, my son did not feel like participating that following week in the scrimmage. He was very disengaged and moping around. I think it was shocking to him what happened the previous week and being the competitive person that he is (and not wanting losing to ruin his sense of self, which it shouldn’t…but that’s a lesson for another day), he just sort of mailed it in. Didn’t chase the ball, didn’t play defense, didn’t want to help his teammates out. I get it, those kids are bigger and more experienced, so I gave him a pass since it was also early in the morning. The following afternoon, we had soccer with his age group that had a friend of his from daycare participating. My son is more “experienced” (if you can even call it that at this age) than most of the kids in that session because some of the kids haven’t played soccer before. The mood from the morning carried over and he didn’t want to play soccer at all. I don’t mind him taking breaks, but not trying at all was quite frustrating to watch because I want my kids to learn that max effort is what matters. Winning and losing doesn’t matter at all.

When the day was done, I had a talk with my son about just trying his best. That’s all I wanted to see. It doesn’t matter if he never scores a goal or kicks the ball away on defense. I just want to see him try. He understood what I was trying to say and we had similar pep talks throughout the week. It all revolved around max effort.

I was interested to see how my son would respond to a bit of adversity and how I tried to reframe things into effort level. During the morning session with the older kids, my son looked like he was a brand new person vs. the last week. He was fighting for the ball from the start and being aggressive against those older kids. He also played terrific defense and had a few opportunities where he defended the goal by kicking the ball away. When my son was playing the striker position, the ball popped out of the mass of kids and he took the ball and scored also. It was his team’s only goal of the day and even though his team lost badly, I was so proud of his effort level against the older and bigger kids.

The afternoon session was equally amazing from an effort level perspective. He was highly engaged and touched the ball frequently, competed hard, and scored two really great goals. He even offered to switch teams so he could help the other side and had some great defensive stops. I was so proud of his engagement and effort level. Even if he didn’t score or kick the ball away, max effort is what I wanted to see and it was there all day.

Parenting is definitely not easy. Just because a parent says one thing doesn’t mean the kid will listen or understand why they need to do what they are told. It’s a complex relationship to navigate and one that I am still learning on the job every day. I always think that good parenting is an accumulation of small moments and I’m trying my best to approach difficult times with small moments of parenting. Over time, when I see the breakthrough like I did in soccer, it makes me feel that I’m on the right path and that I can eventually help my kids fight through their adversity with max effort. I try to get that out of them because I know they are capable of so much - they just need to try.