: How to teach my son that winning is not everything and to lose graciously? My son cries when he loses and quits playing the game My 5-year-old son cries when he loses a game. He gets impatient and throws tantrums and beats

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It's quite normal. Don't worry about it and concentrate on the process of playing the game, and if he wins point out what he did well and could have improved on (in that order) and exactly the same if he loses. It's an important social skill to learn.

Fixing games I personally found to be counter-productive. My eldest started saying things like "It's my turn to win." thereby completely misunderstanding the point of a game -- and he expected this from his peers too. So we moved to games with a purely random nature so that it's clear that no-one can win by skill, and once he'd got used to losing those games graciously (and winning graciously too) then he started being able to lose games where although still random, there's some skill involved, but the best player can still lose.

Games like Monster Bingo are good for starters, as is snap, then on to memory games, snap, card games like whist and ultimately draughts and chess.

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I have two kids with this problem, and one kid with the opposite problem: he doesn't care enough about winning to learn to play better. You don't want that problem either.

For one of the kids who hates losing, letting him play games against a computer seems to work better; he doesn't get upset when he loses to a computer the way he does when he loses to a human being. I'm hoping eventually that will rub off onto play against humans, too. I have not yet tried that technique with the other kid who hates losing.