A soccer league in Canada is making a really really really silly move by introducing a rule that declares any team that wins a game by more than five points will actually…LOSE!!!

What madness has been loosed on Western civilization where adults believe this to be a good idea? Can any adult honestly believe that children today don’t have enough self esteeem? My exeprience is that young people seem extremely confident and ignorant and bratty than ever before.

Why? Because their parents have taught them that to lay down and lose by five points is to win. That’s why.

There’s an old Chinese proverb that says “Failure is not falling down but refusing to get up.” We are teaching our children to not get up with this kind of silliness. We’re teaching them that being knocked down and staying down is a virtue.

You know, my kids all played basketball and soccer. And the basketball teams always kept score. But the soccer leagues refused to keep score the first few years. But you know who knew the score? The kids. They at least knew who won or who lost. It didn’t destroy any of them. My kids got Icees after the game no matter what they did.

Losing teaches us how to win. This is the kind of thing that’s easy to joke about but the scary part is that it really does have a negative effect on kids.

An ironic thing is that while parents attempt to protect children from losing a soccer game they think it’s ok for them to be handed condoms in the sixth grade and so many parents allow them to be sexually active at any age. Hey, you think that the kids living a consequenceless existence could play a role in thinking they can have consequenceless sex and treat each other like garbage as they grow older.

Update: Momma at Weasel Zippers said:

I’d yank my kids out of a league like this. I want my kids taught that anything is possible, Hail Mary passes do exists, and that you never, ever give-up. In my house we treat ‘I can’t’ and ‘I give up’ as swear words. If my kids utter either saying, they will immediately get 30 minutes of doing whatever it was they couldn’t/wouldn’t do.