Should You Let Your Kids Win at Board Games (If You Can)?

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On Parenting at the Washington Post — Should you let your children win at board games? Actually, let me rephrase: Should you let your children win at board games if you can beat them at board games? Because, frankly, I lost a startling number of Chutes and Ladders games to my son when he was 5 (but in my defense, there is zero strategy to Chutes and Ladders, and that dude had no idea what he was doing).

On the whole, we’ve yet to establish a consistent routine about this winning-and-losing situation, and my inconsistency is clearly making a tricky situation worse. Sometimes I’ll take a dive in Battleship, levy an off-base accusation in Clue or make a deliberately lousy chess move to let the little people stay a competitive step ahead, and keep the game moving. And then sometimes I’ll decide that I must use this friendly game of Ticket to Ride: New York to teach him that life is an ever-stretching mosaic of boundless disappointment and that he must begin to navigate it immediately by dealing with how I blocked his route from Central Park to Greenwich Village.

My real bad answer for all this at On Parenting at the Washington Post.

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