Here’s a health essay from the NYTimes on different ways children benefit from being on a losing team. With so many of my kids (and probably yours) on sports teams, this may be a good thing to bring up in our ministries.
Through it all, Sam kept training and got stronger. He gained the discipline to work hard, even in a losing streak. Especially in a losing streak, he told me. “You have to have something, or you’ll just keep losing.”
Experts suggest that this is the attitude that can turn bad experiences into profitable ones. Christopher Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan who has studied the effects of optimism and pessimism, said experts in his field try to help patients “reframe things” to see loss more positively. That might mean encouraging them to take pride in getting through an awful experience, or saying “you didn’t fail, you found something that didn’t work.”
“It doesn’t mean turning people into a Pollyanna,” he said. Rather, it means reinforcing that “there are some good lessons to be learned about what happens in life.”
