Alyssa Giacobbe doesn't want her boyfriend's four-year-old son to be a winner. Well, at least not all of the time. And definitely if he hasn't earned it. 
That's the subject of her Bad Parent essay, entitled "Tough Luck, Kid," in which she confesses that she never lets young Noah win at Candyland, Mario Kart, Memory or any other competitive diversion in which she and the boy may engage. What Giacobbe describes as her "firm stance on winning and losing" has ignited some heated comments on the Babble Web site, many from people who are fired up for reasons that have nothing to do with board games.
"The 'bad parent' isn't a parent at all but a live-in girlfriend who
dislikes her boyfriend's child and sees their relationship as a
competition," writes one commenter. "Yes, she's in a competition with a FOUR YEAR OLD, and
she's going to show that kid who's the bigger, smarter, more awesome
person. How impressive."
Another blames Babble for publishing the piece in the first place: "I also agree with the assessment that this woman is NOT a parent. In
fact, I am deeply offended as an ACTUAL MOTHER that Babble would
publish this. This woman has no idea how actual mothers feel (and
hopefully never will because she is clearly too immature and cold to be
a mother) and to publish this is just reckless."
Okay, all due respect: reckless is pushing it. Driving drunk is reckless. Playing Keep Away with a loaded gun is reckless. Posting an essay by a woman who frequently acts as a caregiver to a child even though she is technically not the child's mother may be questionable to some, but no one is going to die or have his or her life ruined as a result. (For the record, I think the issues Giacobbe describes relate directly to parenting, so I think it's totally valid to run this. But that's me.)
All that said, the fact that Giacobbe is not Noah's mother does raise some valid questions, namely whether she should be enforcing this "the kid stays on the losing side" policy when even she notes that his father doesn't necessarily agree with it. "Bob hasn't yet bought in, skeptical of what he calls my shameless
competitive nature and minimal innate parental wisdom," she writes.
Obviously moms and dads -- or dads and live-in-girlfriend-caregivers, since everyone wants to get technical about this -- don't always agree about how best to teach their children a lesson. But the most important thing, in my mind, is to show a united front. If Dad (and perhaps his mom) often let little Noah win under false pretenses but Giacobbe doesn't, Giacobbe's effort to teach him about the importance of losing gracefully may be, well, lost. Consistency is important. Without it, she just seems like the bad guy. Or, possibly from Noah's perspective, the best Mario Kart player in the history of Wii.
Now, back to the larger point, which is really what this essay is about in the first place: Is the author right or wrong? I say yes, and no. Actually, I think I'm on Bob's side on this one. According to Giacobbe, her partner "practices a moderate halfsies approach to game-playing: Noah is guaranteed a win at least half the time." I think that at least while the child is only four, that's the right way to go.
I completely agree with Giacobbe that it's wrong to always let our kids win, or to lie to them about their failures just so they won't feel bad. It's one of the hazards of something Amy Kuras wrote about here in Strollerderby just last week: self-esteem focused parentings. Many moms and dads focus so intensely on convincing their kids that they can achieve great things that they never bother to teach them the importance of accepting disappointment with dignity. And that's just as crucial to being a success as actual success itself.
The truth is that over the course of a life, most of us win sometimes and lose sometimes. We get a sprinkling of both. And that's why I agree with Noah's dad in this case. At the age of 4, Noah deserves to know the truth: that sometimes luck isn't on your side. So you lay your head on your Thomas the Tank Engine pillowcase at the end of the day with the sobering knowledge that, yes, your father is better at Connect Four than you are. But then there are other, magical days when you reach your maximum potential, the world smiles and all those red, circular chips line up exactly right.
