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Health & Fitness

The Competition Conundrum

When it comes to youth, is there a healthy amount of competition? What is the difference between a strict interest in performance & being intent on attaining mastery? Read on & share your thoughts.

If your house is anything like mine, there have been lots of sports on your flat screen these past few months.  Well, let’s face it, there are always lots of sports on—they just vary from season to season.  At the end of the final quarter, inning, or period, there is a winner.  We bite our nails, munch on nachos, and high five (as if we’ve had something to do with the game altering play) right up until the time clock reads “0” and one team is declared the winner.  One would think that Americans enjoy competition.  I’ve been thinking, though, that our Nation sends mixed messages to our youth about the place for, and appropriateness of, competition.

 There are little league teams that refuse to declare a winner.  That is counter to what the children live off of the field—when experiencing a football filled Sunday at home, for example.  There are some schools that don’t give students letter grades.  Yet, our Nation’s schools are on a Race to the Top.  Adults tell adolescents to relax and enjoy school because time flies.  Then, teens are taken on university campus tours before they’re old enough to have a learner’s permit because college admissions is increasingly cut-throat.  The mixed messages are perplexing, and I imagine they are even more perplexing for youth.

How do we find a healthy balance?  If we conceptualize competition on a continuum, is there a place closer to center where we can situate ourselves?  Is it necessary that there be no “winner” at the end of the game because someone’s feelings may get hurt?  When did the “B” become the “F?”  Should tweens and teens get used to having a locker and eight different teachers before they are pressed to consider a college major? 

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 I can’t give an exact number, dosage, or level for the amount of competition that is “healthy.”  And, in this era of high-stakes testing, there are many who favor one, exact, best answer.  From my ongoing research with the Adolescent Motivation Lab at the University of South Florida I know that there are important differences between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.  Meaning, it is not necessarily unhealthy for a group to be declared “winner” after one particular game and receive a trophy for its performance.  The dangerous shift on the continuum occurs when youth and adults focus solely on performance and solely find motivation in concrete forms of recognition.  At that point, competition with others and/or self is unhealthy. 

Scholarship tells us that there are differences between performance and mastery oriented approaches to tasks.  A mastery approach is preferred because it means that working toward mastery of a particular skill is pursued.  Working toward mastery takes time, critical thought, and purposeful action.  Working toward mastery means that there will be failures along the way.  But, when one has mastered a particular skill, one can “perform” that skill over and over and over because one has a deep understanding of it.   If we instill in our youth a performance oriented approach to both their academic and non-academic tasks, we set them up for anxiety and an inability to deliberately practice a particular skill long enough so that the kind of deep understanding that an expert has about his/her particular skills-set is ever achieved.  Dwayne Wade doesn’t get performance anxiety because he is intent on mastering the game of basketball.  Venus and Serena Williams practice more, not less, the more matches they win: that is the mark of a mastery approach.

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As adults, we need to help our youth celebrate failure.  Yes, celebrate failure.  Ignoring failure doesn’t make it go away.  The simple passage of time does not help one learn from his/her road bumps.  We have to nurture classrooms, courts, and family room couches where our youth feel comfortable talking about failure—being vulnerable.  Only then can we create a strategic plan so that the time spent on practice, while it will not lead to perfection, does lead to more masterful performances. 

by Tara Payor (tafsu21@aol.com)

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