My 5-yr old son plays rec league soccer on Saturday Mornings. He absolutely loves to play. Throughout the week he asks me “how many more days until soccer?” His favorite position is goalie, and for a 5-yr old, blessed with my lack of foot speed, he does a pretty good job.
The league doesn’t keep score, as most leagues for small kids don’t. The ironic thing is, is that pretty much every kid on the field keeps the score in his or her head. My son’s team ran into a real juggernaut this past Saturday. The opponent, lead by a little girl in sequins named “Rachael,” lambasted my boy’s team 9-1 (yes, as a parent, I kept track on the sideline). The first thing my son said to me after the game was “Daddy, we lost”. I responded, “That is OK, I am proud of you, you played your best the whole game.”
Now the people on the other side of the field were also keeping score in their head (though their count was not the same as mine), and during the game older brothers and sisters are yelling out to their siblings “you guys are winning 11-1, keep going.”
Now in the old days when I was a kid we kept scores at these games. Keeping score taught us some valuable lessons. For instance, it taught us that sometimes, in fact 50% of the time in team sports, you are going to lose. If you lose and you try your best, then it is OK. You will come back the next time and try again. You also learned that when you won, you handled it with dignity and you did not taunt your opponents. My politically incorrect view is that there is nothing wrong with teaching 5-yr olds important life lessons about winning and losing, and by not keeping score, we are cheating them.