Toxic Competition and Self-Worth: What We're Teaching Children Without Knowing It

My son and I were driving back from his tennis class yesterday.

He enjoys a good conversation when we have time alone like this. As silly and ridiculous and utterly toddler-like as he can be around friends, only I get to see his immensely mature side in these intimate pockets of togetherness.

So he began taking stock. Tennis. Swim. Cycle. Run. Cricket.

I reminded him he used to do skating too.

“Why did I quit again?” he asked. And then, almost immediately, answered himself. “You stopped taking me. Because you said you didn’t like how competitive that coach was.”

I simply nodded.

“What’s wrong with being competitive?” he prodded. “I like competition. I actually do better when there is competition.”

And just like that, we were in it. One of those conversations that starts as a question and ends up somewhere neither of us quite expected.

I told him: that’s great.

As long as the competition in your mind is helping you perform better, bringing out a better version of you, it is a gift.

But competition itself can turn toxic. And it does so in two very particular ways.

One. When your self-worth becomes tied to it.

I am successful. I am enough. I am worthy. As long as I am ahead of the others.

When that is the equation, every loss is not just a loss in a game. It becomes a statement about who you are. A verdict.

Two. When emotional intelligence is absent.

When it is all about me, and I will do anything to push you down to move ahead.

Less strategy. Less sport.

Less human.

We both went quiet for a moment.

Into one of those beautiful, dreamy silences where something important is settling.

Because here is what we both seemed to sense at the same time, without saying it aloud. Is all of this necessary?

This culture of competition without awareness. Without emotional intelligence. Without any real relationship to the self.

It is not just unnecessary.

It is genuinely toxic.

I told him how from a very young age, we are celebrated if we come first. Not if we grow. Not if we try something difficult. Not if we fall and get up with more understanding than before.

First.

Just first.

And this obsession with coming first slowly, quietly, loses all connection to growing, to becoming a better version of oneself. It pivots entirely toward comparison. And comparison, without awareness, educates the self directly in the language of superiority and inferiority.

I am enough if I beat you. I am less if I don’t.

This conditioning begins early. Very early. And it runs so deep that most of us as adults are still living inside it. Still measuring ourselves, still justifying ourselves, still shrinking or swelling based on how we compare to the person beside us.

Not growing.

Comparing.

And then I shared something with Kanav that I had never shared with him before.

I used to roller skate.

And I was good. Genuinely good.

But what I remember most is not a feeling of superiority. What I remember is a feeling of pure joy on wheels. Innocent. Free. Taking risks, speeding, as though the whole universe was holding me. Like I was made for this. Like I could not fall.

That is how I was.

I see it now. And I appreciate that girl.

My coach had three daughters who had been skating with him long before I arrived as a beginner. My learning arc from beginner to proficient was rapid. Before long, I had surpassed his youngest daughter. And then, in one district-level competition, for the first time, I beat his second daughter, the one he had been training most seriously, the one he had placed his greatest hopes on.

When the results came out and I came home with a state-level gold medal around my neck, I went hop, skip, and jumping to him.

His first words to me were:

“Don’t be so proud.”

He was visibly sour.

Today, I understand that as envy. A coach’s complicated grief at seeing his daughter lose to the girl he had not bet on.

Back then, I was simply confused. And momentarily, quietly, hurt.

Then Kanav reflected.

He shared some of his own experiences from his beautiful twelve years of life.

He said: “You know Amma, the other day we had a running race in the society. One of my friends wanted to race against another friend who is the fastest. He did. He lost. And immediately his response was, it is because my leg is injured today.”

I was overjoyed.

“You have pointed at the exact thing,” I told him.

Why does anyone need to justify themselves like that?

Because their self-worth is tied to being better, not a better version of themselves, but better than another. And when that falls apart, even for a moment, the mind scrambles for an explanation. Anything. Something. To restore the story. 

My leg was injured.

What good does that do?

Unless you simply use an external marker as information. Someone runs faster than me. Interesting. What is beyond my own comfort zone? And then you go back to your own track. Your own growth. Your own unfolding.

All of us, very subconsciously, carry this.

Comparison. 

Self-worth stitched to success that is defined by being better than someone else. And when that doesn’t hold, the consolation: at least I am better than that one. Or that one.

A whole architecture of identity, built on someone else’s position.

What a fragile house to live in.

What a conversation it was.

The way Kanav pressed to understand what exactly is toxic, not just accepting my framing but pushing on it, helped me see it more clearly myself.

This is what children do when we allow them to. They don’t just receive our thinking. They reflect it back to us. Cleaner. More honest.

And sometimes, in answering them, we find the thing we had been trying to say to ourselves for years.

So here is where I am sitting with all of this today.

Competition, at its best, is a mirror.

It shows you where you are. It invites you to go further. It gives you information about what is possible.

But a mirror is not a judge.

And the moment you let competition become your judge, the arbiter of your worth, your enoughness, your place in the world, you are no longer competing.

You are surviving.

There is a difference.

And perhaps the most important question we can teach children, and remind ourselves, to ask every single time is this:

Am I trying to grow beyond who I was yesterday?

Or am I simply trying to be ahead of someone else?

One of these is a practice.

The other is a cage.

Want to engage in conscious self-work? Talk to me. Coach with me. Grow with me.

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