Primary schools no longer hold competitions at sports days. Does this mean children are losing their competitive edge because their ambition is not nurtured?
Children who are not good in sports would give up if they are made to compete and constantly fail, according to sports psychologist Adele Muscat.
Primary schools in Malta have done away with competitions at sports days and adopt the ‘everyone is a winner’ approach and all get a medal at the end.
Earlier this month, UK experts warned that Britain risked losing its competitive edge after a study found that a majority of children are no longer interested in winning.
However, according to Dr Muscat, ambition is more of a “personality characteristic”. “Some children are competitive in everything they do, so, no, I don’t think this will result in adults lacking ambition,” she said.
“I can definitely speak from 15 years’ experience working with young athletes: competition is sometimes not good for children as they feel under pressure, can’t cope with school and sport, develop even psychosomatic illnesses and may want to drop out of the sport altogether.”
PE lessons now focus on making sport a lifestyle health habit and the development of physical social, mental and moral skills.
She concurred that some sport disciplines, such as gymnastics, tennis and swimming, necessitated childhood competitions. “In such sport, if you do not start competing early you will not make it as a top player, especially on the international scene. It all depends where you want to go with the sport. Do we want our children to participate simply for fun and to become competent in the skill? Or do we push them to become top athletes?”
Do we want our children to participate simply for fun and to become competent in the skill? Or do we push them to become top athletes?
She believes that the top reason why children should practise sport is to have fun because it is only if they have fun that they will continue in the sport.
When they are of age to start competing, will they be able to cope? According to Dr Muscat, sport psychologists working with young athletes prepare them for all eventualities that may arise and help teach them how to handle stress.
Veteran educator and sportsman Lino Bugeja spoke out for competitive sport in schools and said that children did not suffer emotional harm from taking part in competitions and not winning.
Mr Bugeja said that children enjoyed healthy competition and rose to the challenge of a variety of sports to find the prospect of winning and losing “exciting”.
He bemoaned the fact that children no longer played freely in the streets. “Street football was the perfect training ground for life,” he said.
“Children like competing. They don’t suffer an emotional crippling for life if they don’t win,” he said. Mr Bugeja thinks that unless competitions are reinstated in primary schools, children will be weaker in life. “How can we teach them about competitiveness in business?”
His voice is lost among sports activists who are in favour of competition-free environments.
Ray Farrugia who runs the Żażu Football School, said that sports’ trainers were there to produce players not to make them win the game. “Our job is to inspire confidence and produce young boys and girls,” he said.
“It’s a learning process but I have this to say of today’s children: they are very spoilt. Their parents think they are something special and come up to me and say ‘my son is a star’, so it’s better that there is no competition at a young age.”
In football nurseries, a similar approach has been adopted for the past five years. The Malta Football Association’s technical centre follows the ‘long-term player development’ philosophy. This allows players to develop ‘at their own level’ without being ‘coerced’ with undue pressure.
MFA technical director Robert Gatt said such a philosophy was even enforced at local nurseries whenever they held festivals and tournaments for children below the age of 12. “The studies that promote such a philosophy, emphasising also a multilateral development in the early years are several. They warn against the ill-effects of early specialisation,” he said.
Anthropologist Sharon Attard believes that the emergence of a more wary attitude towards the idea of ‘competition’ may stem from the UNHCR children’s rights approach, which often expresses concern at the immense pressure being put on some children to outperform their peers in sport.
“The result of this often tends to be that the ability to perform in sport and, particularly, to surpass the abilities of one’s peers, becomes intrinsically tied to the child’s inner sense of their own value as a person. This is where concern often arises,” she said.