Are we terrible parents for occasionally letting our kids win? Are we more or less horrible if we skunk them ten games consecutively?

The battle continues.

I’m a firm believer in allowing the mood, the personality of the child and the number of previous thumpings, dictate how intensely I will compete in subsequent games.

One of our children bursts into tears any time she loses a game. It could be a coin toss, it could be a race to put on snow-pants or a version of “Go Fish” played with mismatched pairs of Polly Pocket shoes. If she is not the victor there will be tears. Do I coddle this child by letting her win in an attempt to boost her confidence or am I teaching her a terrible life lesson, throwing her to the wolves when it comes time to play with a friend?

I have another child who beats me fair and square. I try my hardest, she wins. Sometimes she loses but when she does, there are rarely complaints and I feel as though I am competing against an adult. There is no follow up discussion about how either one of us could have played our cards differently to produce some other outcome (a conversation I loathe when playing with adults—let’s replay that entire hand and see how Liz could have been more on the ball), it’s a simple winner/loser mentality and we are both okay with it.

Alternatively, we could play cooperative games where the outcome is designed to give the competitors, playing as a “team” a warm fuzzy after their combined efforts produce a positive result like keeping a wave from washing away a three cm high sand castle, in other words, there are to be no losers. I beg to differ. We are all losers when we play cooperative games. They are time consuming and nobody celebrates a cardboard wave retracting from a sand castle none of us cared about in the first place.

But what about when your child looks you in the eye and asks, “Did you let me win?”

Me: No.

The answer is always “no” so now I’ve cheated and lied and according to every wedding I’ve ever attended, aren’t we only meant to cheat death and lie to save a friend?

Maybe we should be teaching our children there are no guaranteed victories. The Canadian juniors proved that. If we work hard at something and never give up, eventually a win is inevitable.

Sometimes a child’s effort alone deserves to land them the gold medal and I’m glad to be the one to drape it around their necks at the UNO closing ceremonies even when the win is a result of me holding onto that pick- up-four-colour-card one hand too long.