Honey, I Wrecked the Kids

My sister has ruined two of her three children.  I know this for a fact because she's told me so.  And the only reason the third one hasn't been wrecked yet is because, as the youngest, there hasn't been enough time.   I have wrecked my kids as well, and it can all be traced to the game Hot Potato.

This past Christmas while I was volunteering for the holiday party in my fifth-grader's classroom, I had to direct the kids in a holiday game based on the whole Hot Potato idea, where an object is passed around the circle until time is called and whoever is left holding the object is out.  At eleven years of age, almost none of these kids knew how to play, including my own.  This is why:  when the girls were little, I would have their birthday parties at home, which always included a craft, games, and cake.  Because parties are supposed to be happy and because I couldn't bear to make a kid sad (and, let's face it, because it's annoying when kids cry), I'd always plan games where everyone was a winner .  And that meant no games of Hot Potato.

Fast forward five years filled with trophies given for showing up and games where everyone's a winner, and you get a bunch of kids afraid to fail because they didn't learn to fail when the stakes were low.  Or you get a bunch of kids thinking they're good at lots of things that they're not.  Or sometimes both.   As the old saying goes, "My bad."