agonyaunt | One column, two letters

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1. Dear Care and Feeding,

My 7-year-old son “Mason” plays soccer and really enjoys it and has made some good friends on the team. The issue is that my husband “Nigel” is a borderline soccer hooligan. While at our son’s games, he is perpetually making loud comments and curses when he thinks a call is unfair. He even earned himself a three-game suspension after he stormed down to the field to confront the referee when he called a foul on Mason and had to be pulled away by two other dads and both coaches.

Mason is really upset by his dad’s behavior (as am I and all of the other parents!) and asked if I can get him to stop. I have tried. Nigel is normally a decent and mild-mannered person. But when it comes to our son’s games, it’s like he becomes possessed. He keeps assuring me he will tone it down, but it doesn’t happen, no matter how many times I ask. I am this close to speaking to those in charge about barring my husband from attending the games for the remainder of the season. Can you suggest anything that would allow him to watch our son play without causing a riot?

—Sports Dad Issues

Dear Sports Dad Issues,

Controlling your emotions is a valuable life skill, and your husband is setting an absolutely terrible example for your son. Your husband needs to talk to someone about his anger and lack of self control before it goes too far. Sports aren’t an excuse to act this way—regularly cursing in front of kids in response to a call you disagree with!—and anyone taking 7-year-old soccer games this seriously needs to seek professional help. If the circumstances were different (road rage, Karen-ing out at the grocery store when someone goes to pay with a check), what would happen? He’s on the road to ostracizing you and your family from the rest of the children’s soccer community through his behavior—and potentially creating even worse consequences. You can’t make him go to therapy or take an anger management course, but you can tell him it’s what you think he needs to do.

Try to appeal to Nigel’s sense of empathy. He is embarrassing his son in front of his teammates. If he wants his son to enjoy himself playing soccer, he needs to stop coming to games until he is able to strengthen his emotional skills. It sounds like, given his promises to tone it down, that he is at least a little aware that there’s a real issue here, and also like he’s generally a great person—you can position yourself as being on his team. What you want for him is to be the person you know he can be. And both of you are on your kid’s team. He shouldn’t be the reason that his kid doesn’t want to play sports. Tell him to be a role model, not a cautionary tale.

Don’t go behind your husband’s back to have him barred from attending games. That will backfire when he finds out. Ideally, if he finds it impossible to not show up and yell, he would ask for himself to be “recused,” or admit to you that he’s unable to control himself and have you ask for him to be barred. Keeping himself away from the field before he does something bad enough to get suspended again will be doing you, your son, and everyone favor. If he really needs to watch, you can FaceTime him from the game. Though, mute him and make sure he knows he’s muted. I was going to suggest you have him sit in the car from a spot where he can see, but I wouldn’t trust him not to get out and come raging in after a bad call. Hopefully, any measures you take here are something both of you are on board with—and, as he works on his emotions, temporary.

****

2. Dear Care and Feeding,

My 9-year-old loves playing board games … until she doesn’t. Occasionally she can lose with grace, but more often she gets extremely distressed if she thinks she’s doing worse than the other player, or if she’s in danger of losing. Something close to panic sets in, as if it’s an emergency that she win the game. And she asks to play games; no one is forcing her! I really want to help her— it would be lovely if we could play fun family games that don’t devolve into tears and accusations of unfairness. Sure we could play collaborative board games, but the ability to lose an inconsequential game without fully losing it seems important. She is on the autism spectrum, but otherwise has no tendency towards meltdowns or extreme reactions. It’s just games. Any advice?

—Sore Loser

Dear Sore Loser,

I do get where you daughter is coming from. The trouble with some games is that it’s possible to be losing so badly halfway through that you have no shot whatsoever at winning, and then you have to sit there taking punches and watching someone else gleefully tap their pieces around the board until the bloodbath is over. This is why I don’t play Monopoly and why I promote cheating at Sorry. Modern board games like Catan solve this problem by having multiple avenues to winning and being able to hide some of your progress from opponents. Still, even those games can wind up being a slog.

For this reason, if your daughter wants to play a longer game, I would actually stick to the collaborative ones like Outfoxed, Pandemic or Robinson Crusoe. For what my family calls “winning games,” start with the shortest ones you can think of and train her into losing gracefully. Remember: most people lose. That’s why winning is interesting. Some short games that we’ve had success with include Connect 4, Gin Rummy, and Pass the Pigs.

With any game, long or short, don’t finish the game if she starts getting out of sorts. It’s important for her to understand that the game is supposed to be fun. If she’s not having fun (or, more likely, making the game no fun for everyone else), there’s nothing wrong with stopping. Don’t guilt trip her about it, just let her know that it doesn’t seem like she’s having fun, and it’s time to do something else. She knows what she did and maybe next time, if she wants to finish, she’ll realize that staying calm is the way to do it. It took me until I was an adult to realize that if I didn’t like a book anymore I could just put it down. Ideally, she will learn to just opt out of certain games from the get-go. But life is too short to finish a crappy TV series, or a Monopoly game in which your brother has managed to get three quarters of the board in a series of ill-informed negotiations and shakedowns. She can work on mastering the skill of losing with grace, and the skill of just not engaging in leisure activities that she knows she’s liable to wind up hating.

—Greg

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1. Nigel is heading for an assault charge. LW shouldn't "go behind his back" to get him banned, LW needs to do it openly. "Yes, honey, I told the league to ban you from all games for the forseeable future. You know why."

And frankly, I'd advise LW to get counseling - who even knows what they're just not bringing up?

2. Several commenters are suggesting luck based games instead of skill based games, but I think that's a mistake - if you fall behind in a luck based game you have no possible way to improve your score.

I'd advise giving her a formal handicap - she can make X number of rerolls during the game, she can pass her turn after a certain number of draws instead of continuing to draw cards, she's explicitly given a start of 50 points instead of 0 points - whatever makes sense for the game.

So my question about #2 is: what happens when she loses anyway? Is it your experience that the "it's not fair, let's change the rules" phase/mindset/whatever it is becomes more amenable to that if given a formal handicap? I'm not saying it doesn't, I haven't tried it, I'm genuinely asking.

In my experience lots of kids find it easier to deal with frustration if you've shown you're trying to be fair. (That, or they decide suddenly that handicaps for them are babyish and now they don't want them, nor do they want people thinking they need them.)

This assumes that on some level the kid is capable of reining this in before it gets this bad. She might not be. If she's not, then the answer is to say "Listen, when you don't win, you stop having fun - and you make it so nobody else has fun either. I don't think you're doing it on purpose, but I'd rather do something where we can both have fun no matter what."

She'll either outgrow this or she won't, but there's no need to make everybody miserable in the meantime.

She'll either gain the emotional maturity to handle losing or gain the general maturity to curate her game collection so that she only does supposedly fun things that are actually fun for her.

She's a girl so she probably won't grow up to be Nigel.

LW shouldn't "go behind his back" to get him banned, LW needs to do it openly.

I had the exact same thought.

1) Why exactly is LW writing this in, and not Nigel? Why does Mason ask LW for help, but not his dad? I think there's a lot more going on here than it looks on the surface, and Nigel is *not* a "decent and mild-mannered person."

2) As someone who felt terrible about losing board games for years, I can say that the thing that helped me most was accepting that I just didn't find the experience fun and that's okay. Then I stopped playing.

LW says "the ability to lose an inconsequential game without fully losing it seems important," but is it really? If the kid isn't having meltdowns over other kinds of disappointments, is it really important to be able to partake gracefully in a fully voluntary activity that hurts her? Maybe she keeps trying because LW is disappointed in her, not because she wants to play.

Re #2, I'm interested in how you got to accepting that you didn't find the experience fun, because LW says the kid is specifically asking to play these games. Would it help to have an adult directly say, "You don't seem to be enjoying this, do you know that you don't have to do optional things like games and parties if you don't enjoy them?" or is this something the kiddo is going to have to figure out on her own? Should LW try offering alternate activities that the kiddo seems to enjoy more--was it ever a case of "I don't enjoy this but it's the only activity adult x or admired older kid y will do with me"?

Oh, I totally asked, too! I was the main driver for playing board games in my household when I was a kid. I also had that sense of panic LW described when I started to lose. The main problem was two things together:

- In my household, quitting was bad. ("Try again! Don't give up!")
- My slot in the family was the over-achiever, so losing hurt my sense of identity.

Neither of these were things I understood at nine, though. I just knew I had to keep doing it until I got it right. If you asked me directly, I would have lied through my teeth and said I was having fun because I didn't really feel like I had any other choice.

What helped was watching my adult friends model different behaviors. If someone isn't having fun, we can declare the game over and move on. We can talk about not having fun with games as a personal preference and not a moral failing (ie, "I don't like games" rather than "I'm a sore loser"). Games could be interrupted in the middle for conversation, which showed they were less important than being together. I could just give up, and that was okay.

I'm probably sympathizing too hard with the kid in this letter, but the idea that someone would look at their panicking kid and think "they just need to experience this more" drives me crazy.

This is very useful, thank you.

You know, this helped me articulate something about myself -- I also was a kid who panicked and melted down about losing, and experiencing it repeatedly didn't make me better ... but in other areas the messaging was "you can do/be anything you want", and academically I was pretty on top and that was a large part of my identity ... but speaking academically, if someone else gets a good grade, it doesn't affect my grade, whereas the same isn't true in competitive games. And I think I saw losing as failing.

Edited (typo) 2025-05-01 19:27 (UTC)

Samesies, with the cherry on top of my younger sister (who felt overshadowed by me in all things, which I had no idea about) gloating about her wins with the amount of enthusiasm that feeling overshadowed in general warranted. Monopoly got banned quickly, because I wouldn't play it and my sister didn't have fun when it was only her and our mom playing.

Yes, my experience growing up was very similar! I don't play board games anymore if I can avoid it because it was always such a fraught thing when I was young. It really felt more like a family obligation than a fun hobby, and I spent a lot of time trying to perform the "correct" emotions about it. I honestly had no idea I was allowed to not enjoy myself.

I do think it's important to tell kids directly that sometimes it's okay to skip out on optional things that make them unhappy. Not everything, sure, but kids pick up on social norms and expectations, and don't necessarily have the context to realize that those expectations aren't rules set in stone.

Thank you, this is a really insightful comment! You not only sympathize with the kid, which is fine, we all pick sides when we read agony letters, you empathize with her and have some really good ideas about how she might be feeling.

My family also had an autistic kid who begged for games but couldn't deal with losing. But actually "losing" isn't just one thing. It might be other people gloating, it might be feeling that you fell short of expectations, it might be the game dragging on too long, it might be frustration at your lack of skill (either you know you made a tactical mistake, or you can't see a way to do better). Board game scoring can give you feedback in a way that can be hard to deal with, not immediate but while you are still emotionally invested.

Also the sore loser thing is really hard to navigate. You're supposed to be competitive and take the game seriously and care about winning, but you're also supposed to be emotionally neutral about whether you actually win or not. So it's not even the expectation of winning or not winning, it's the meta-expectation about how you're supposed to feel.

#2: Ditto. I generally don't like competitive board games unless I'm playing with exactly the right group of people. Weirdly, some card games (Uno, Cards Against Humanity) are fine, but I come from a family that can be kind of nasty about competition. Sorry was actually banned for much of my childhood. To make matters worse, I pretty much wipe the floor with them on any kind of trivia game (which they give me shit over), so when something comes along that I'm not good at, they gloat, a LOT. I just flat out refuse to play at family gatherings.

I'm not sure this is just 'Nigel' rather than a wider social issue: why does kids’ football bring out the worst in parents? (almost exclusively fathers).

Edited (tyop) 2025-05-01 09:21 (UTC)

It's not a new thing either; my grandfather used to referee local games, and on at least one occasion ended up locking himself in the changing rooms for fear of being attacked. This would have been sometime between the 1920s and 1950s.

Sighted in Devonport, Tasmania, Australia, but Sports Parentzillas have unfortunately made this kind of sign format ubiquitous:

(Image description: a strip of grassy soccer field, with the legs of a child player and two adults within frame, visible just beyond a large sign reading, in alternate blue and red sentences on a white ground:

Please Remember

THESE ARE KIDS
THIS IS A GAME
THE COACHES ARE VOLUNTEERS
THE REFEREES ARE HUMAN
THIS IS NOT THE WORLD CUP)

*giggles*

I saw a similar sign with "In memory of Bob So-and-so" at the bottom, unintentionally implying that Bob was killed in a tragic Little League parental rage incident (someone in the ensuing discussion looked him up and he had been involved in the program and just coincidentally died.)

The real fun comes from marching band, drill team, and color guard: all the powers of Sports Parentzillas and Performing Arts Parentzillas combined!

(Source: a marching band, drill team, and color guard mom of my acquaintance. I suspect the same is true of cheerleading—-once you’re marching while piled three deep in a pyramid formation and hurling ninety pounds of somebody through the air like a Marvel Comics combo move, how can it avoid being a sport in its own right?)

Edited 2025-05-01 17:43 (UTC)

how can it avoid being a sport in its own right

Expensive lawyers who argue that it's not a sport and therefore should not be regulated like one.

ahahahaha oh noooooooooooooooo

I suspect the same is true of cheerleading

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanda_Holloway

"Wanda Webb Holloway (born 1954) is an American woman from Channelview, Texas who was convicted of attempting to hire a hitman to kill the mother of her daughter's junior high school cheerleading rival"

I vaguely recall the incident, and and am not even remotely surprised by the locale.

Particularly given this far more recent uproar, and note how it spiraled fractally out of control: https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/dallas-county/downtown-dallas-texas-nca-cheerleader-competition-incident/287-5e8610ef-5b74-425e-b02f-da3d0f8f165a

Why am I not surprised.

Dismayed? Yes. Surprised? No.

There are a lot of field with these signs in Australia - my hockey fields all have them.

And yes, sometimes you have to cool someone down on or off the field. I used to be the person calming the hothead on our team (a fifteen year old with a strong sense of justice) when we got a call she felt was unfair. (Sorry kiddo, sometimes the dice just fall shitwise.)

Thankfully, I wasn't the person trying to rein in a former coach (who was...not great with the encouragement) - that fell to our captain at the time, who was an absolute trooper...

It's a small thing, but the mention towards the end of reply #1 about "bad calls" annoyed me: this is a child's game, and the letter says nothing about actual bad calls, only "calls [Nigel] thinks are unfair", which is a different thing entirely. Clearly, he has strong feelings about sports, and seems to include a bias for his son (which is understandable!), but the two together means that he may well be contesting perfectly good calls by the refs, because he feels the need to be That Hooligan at sports.

(I know, refs are human, and sometimes bad calls happen; this is a kid's game, and that should be fine, not a source of adult tantrums and confrontation.)

Agreed, I really felt that conceded unnecessarily much to Nigel.

It sounds like #2's daughter approaches the game as "I'd like to win Game X", rather than "I'd like to have fun playing Game X". I think putting the game away if she isn't having fun is a good idea, and then gently asking about her motivation and expectations around suggesting playing the game. Is she getting a message from somewhere that she needs to prove herself by winning?

Don’t forget the possibility of a persistent subtext of, “With your intelligence…” (not only legendary prodigies but comic book omnidisciplinary geniuses are realistic role models, and you suck if you fall short of them. Also, Smart People Play (And Win! Blindfolded against multiple opponents!) Chess/Go/Weiqi.)

Edited 2025-05-01 17:52 (UTC)

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