Renata’s sister came up for a long weekend a while back and, within about an hour of arriving, sat our older kid down for a game, one of the lighter card games we keep around for exactly this purpose, and proceeded to play completely straight, no mercy, no visible softening of her actual strategy at all. I watched this happen from the kitchen half expecting to have to step in and found myself just as invested in how it would go as anyone in the room.

Our kid lost, decisively, and I braced for the sulk that sometimes follows a loss at that age. It didn’t come, not really, there was a moment of genuine disappointment and then, almost immediately, a very specific question, how did you know to do that, which is a completely different reaction than the one I think would’ve shown up if she’d been handed a soft, engineered near-win instead. Renata’s sister has a whole stated philosophy about this, that kids can smell a throwaway game a mile off even when they can’t articulate why it feels hollow, and that an honest loss where you can actually ask a follow-up question teaches more than a fake win ever does.

I don’t fully agree with her, for what it’s worth, I think there’s a real skill-gap window where some scaffolding is worth doing on purpose, and I’ve handicapped myself deliberately in games with our younger one who’s still working out basic turn-taking, let alone strategy. But watching that specific exchange, the honest loss followed by a real question instead of a real sulk, made me reconsider how much of my own instinct to soften things is actually protecting the kid versus just protecting myself from having to sit through a rough five minutes.

We’ve settled into something like a middle position since, straight play once a kid’s old enough to actually want to understand why they lost, real scaffolding before that, and a running family joke that if you want honest feedback on your play you ask Renata’s sister and if you want comfort you ask me. I don’t think either instinct is wrong. I think it’s useful having both instincts represented at the same table, honestly, so a kid gets exposed to both kinds of adult before they decide which kind of player they want to become.

What’s stuck with me longest, actually, is a smaller detail from later that same weekend. Our kid asked to play again the next morning, unprompted, specifically against Renata’s sister again rather than against me or Renata, which I don’t think would’ve happened after a soft loss. There was something in getting beaten cleanly that made the rematch feel worth asking for, a real target to measure against instead of a hollow win nobody quite believed in. I keep coming back to that when I catch myself softening a game for one of the kids out of habit rather than actual necessity, and I don’t always manage to stop myself, but I notice it now, which I don’t think I would have before that particular weekend.