When my younger son loses a baseball game, he's completely fine.

He won't say it out loud, but he knows somebody else missed a catch, or the other team just hit better that day. We lost. It doesn't sit on him and half the time the whole team decides the umpire was against them, and then they're all annoyed about the umpire together, which somehow makes them closer than winning would have.

It's ridiculous and it works. To be fair, adults do the exact same thing.

On the other hand, if he loses a tennis match - the story changes. 

He takes the entire thing on himself. Walks off upset. You have to sit with him a while and bring him back down because it was all him. Even though every tennis player who has ever lived loses about half their matches. 

I've been thinking about that a lot, because fall sign-ups are open right now and most seasons start after Labor Day which means a lot of you are filling in forms this week.

Most of us pick the way we always pick. The sport that’s available, fits the schedule or what their friend is doing.

There's a better question, not many of us ask: where does your kid put a loss?

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WHAT EACH ONE ACTUALLY GIVES THEM

Individual sports build confidence you can't fake.

When he plays a match and wins, he knows it was him. All of it. No ambiguity, nobody to share it with, no way to talk himself out of it. That's a very clean kind of confidence and I'm not sure where else a kid gets it.

He's genuinely good at tennis. A lot of what makes him good is that the pressure sits entirely on him, which is the same reason the losses land the way they do. You don't get one without the other.

Team sports teach so many things that aren't the sport.

How to work with people you didn't choose, make friends inside a structure. How to sit on a bench. How to be in last place with a company and lose without it being about you.

All this led me to the conclusion that perhaps a kid needs both in their lives.

THE RESEARCH IS BLUNTER THAN I EXPECTED

I went looking for something to back up what I'd been noticing, and here’s what I found..

There's a study of more than 11,000 American children and adolescents.

The team sport findings were roughly what you'd guess: kids playing team sports had 10% lower anxious/depressed scores than kids playing no sport at all, 19% lower withdrawn scores, and 17% fewer social problems.

Then they looked at kids who played only individual sports. Those kids scored 16% higher on anxious/depressed and 12% higher on social problems.

Higher than the kids who played no organized sport whatsoever.

The researchers said outright they hadn't expected it. They'd assumed individual sports would help too, just less. Their explanation is the obvious one, those kids carry sole responsibility for how it goes, and that amplifies the self-criticism.

But here's the finding that actually changed how I think about this:

Kids who played both showed no significant difference from kids who played nothing at all. The team sport appears to cancel the effect out.

THE RULE ISN'T SYMMETRICAL

This is the part I'd take into the sign-up form this week.

If your kid's main thing is a team sport, they're generally fine without an individual one. They're getting the social side, the shared losses, the belonging. An individual sport would add something, but nothing essential is missing.

If your kid's main thing is an individual sport, they need a team.

It isn't "balance is nice." It's that a kid competing alone is missing a structure the team provides, and adding one appears to close the gap almost entirely.

I got to this by watching my son walk off a tennis court, long before I saw any research. He's brilliant at tennis, there's enormous internal pressure in it, and the social part just isn't there. So we put him in baseball, not because he needs to be a great baseball player. But because he needs somewhere a loss belongs to nine people instead of one.

TWO THINGS THIS DOESN'T MEAN

Some kids genuinely can't do team sports, and that's real.

There are kids who can't cope with the competition inside a team. They feel watched and critiqued and it makes them anxious and for those kids, swimming or tennis genuinely works better. That's not a failure to be fixed.

The team sport only works if they actually play.

There are always two or three kids on a team who aren't as strong, and there are coaches who only put the good players in. If your kid is on the sideline every week, or gets thirty seconds at the end, the team sport isn't doing a single thing I've described.

It's doing the opposite.

If that's happening: look for a different team or a different coach. I know that's easier said than done. But if you can't move them, find something individual where they can feel successful because a kid who's last everywhere is a real problem.

None of this is really about the physical side of sports. It's about a kid's confidence, and having somewhere they get to feel successful.

WHEN THERE ISN'T A TEAM AVAILABLE

With my older one, the situation is completely different.

He plays tennis. He acts, which is the most individual thing on this list. He walks into an audition alone, gets judged by strangers, and finds out weeks later whether he was enough. There's no teammate anywhere near that.

He doesn't have a team sport, because he aged out of baseball unless he goes all in competitively.

So by my own rule, he's exactly the kid who needs one. But the option isn't there and if you've got a 12 or 13-year-old, you might be running into the same wall.

Except your kids can have a team. Maybe it just isn't a sport.

Mine is in musical theater. The school plays accomplish a lot of the things the baseball team does for his brother. He's one part of something that only works if everyone turns up. If he's out, somebody notices immediately. Opening night goes well or badly for all of them at once, and when it goes wrong, they're all annoyed about the same thing together, which is the umpire situation in a different costume.

That's what made me realize the thing we call "a team sport" was actually just three ingredients and once you know what they are, you can go looking for them anywhere:

A shared outcome. They win or lose together. This is the one that does most of the work , it's what gives a loss somewhere to go.

People they didn't choose. Not their friend group. Assigned, or self-selected around the activity rather than around liking each other. Learning to work with someone you wouldn't have picked is half the value.

Something at stake, together. A game, a performance, a competition, a deadline. Something that can go badly for all of them at the same time.

Test whatever your kid does against those three. A school play cast has all of them. So does a band, a robotics team, a debate team, a scout troop (assuming it has an actual expedition!)

A group class usually doesn't. Ten kids in the same room each doing their own pottery, taught by the same person, is not a team.
Nobody's outcome depends on anybody else's, and if your kid skips a week nothing changes for anyone. That's a nice activity and it's socially better than nothing. But it won't do the job this issue is about.

Neither will a training squad where everyone trains together and competes individually. That one catches a lot of parents out, and it's worth being honest with yourself about, because it looks like a team from the parking lot.

So if your kid's whole competitive life is happening alone and the team sports have closed off, you're not stuck. You're just looking for the three ingredients somewhere other than a field.

A Note for My Fellow Laid-Back Parents

I want to be careful here, because nobody should read a study about 11,000 children and start panicking about their one specific kid.

Your kid is not a percentage. Plenty of children play an individual sport, love it, and are completely fine.

But if you're filling in a form this week and your child's whole competitive life happens alone, it's worth asking whether there's anywhere in their week where a bad day gets shared out.

That's really all a team is. Somewhere to put a loss so it isn't sitting on one small person.

See you next week,
Lakshmi 💛

📺 LAKSHMI WATCHES THIS WEEK:

Two things I watched this week when I needed a few minutes to myself: 

🎬 Movie Trailer I Found Interesting: 

👨‍👩‍👧 Parenting Moment That Hit: