Your child cried after losing a chess game. Good.

The king tips over. Your child stares at the board for a second, then the face crumples. Pieces get pushed off the table. A cousin, or a brother, or you, has won.

Most of us rush in. “It’s only a game.” “You played well.” “Next time you’ll win.” Anything to stop the crying.

Hold on before you do.

Two common responses, and what they teach

The first response is protection. Some parents let the child win, or stop playing games with a winner and a loser. The child stays happy, and learns nothing about losing until it arrives somewhere bigger: a school race, a failed test, a competition at fourteen.

The second response is a slogan. Praise the effort, not the result. Tell them mistakes help the brain grow. These ideas fill parenting pages and school posters.

In 2018 a group of researchers combined the studies on “growth mindset”, the idea behind those slogans, covering over 365,000 students. The link between a child’s mindset and their grades was weak. Programmes designed to change mindset had a tiny average effect on achievement, with some benefit for students from poorer homes or at academic risk.

So a phrase won’t fix it. Your child doesn’t need a better sentence from you at the moment of losing.

Tears after a loss mean your child cared about the result. Worry more about the child who shrugs every time.

What the tears are telling you

A child who never cries after losing has often stopped caring, or stopped trying. They play half-heartedly so a loss doesn’t count. Adults do the same thing. We avoid the exam, the job application, the business idea, because if we never try properly, we never properly fail.

Your crying child is still in the game. Protect the caring, and help with the hurt.

The question is how to help them carry the loss without avoiding the next game.

The first ten minutes

• Say less. “Losing hurts” is enough. Skip the lecture and the analysis.
• Let the crying run its course, close by, without fixing.
• Don’t promise a win next time. You don’t control it, and your child knows.
• Don’t let the winner gloat, and don’t make the winner apologise for winning.
• When the tears stop, offer something ordinary: water, a snack, a walk to the shop.

The next day: replay the game

Here chess gives you a tool most games don’t. A chess game gets written down move by move in notation, and replayed later. In our classes, children learn to record their games for this reason.

A day after the loss, when feelings have cooled, set up the board and replay the game together. Go slowly. Your job is to ask, not to tell.

1. “Show me where you felt you were winning.”
2. “Where did it start to go wrong?”
3. “What else did you think of playing here?”
4. “What will you look out for next game?”

Most lost games turn on one or two moves: a piece left unguarded, a check missed. When your child finds the move themselves, the loss turns into one concrete thing to watch for. Write it on a sticky note by the board.

Coding works the same way. A program which won’t run is a lost game. The child reads the error, guesses why, tests the guess. The habit is the same in both: look back, find the move, fix it.

Watch yourself too

Children copy how the adults around them lose. What do you say after a bad day at work, a lost football bet, a client who said no? If you call yourself useless in front of your child, a phrase about growing brains won’t undo it.

Next time you lose at something small in front of them, narrate it out loud. “I lost because I rushed. Tomorrow I’ll check twice.” It feels silly. Children notice.

Read the research before you trust the posters

The Sisk study is long, and the link is at the bottom of the page. It doesn’t say effort is pointless or mindset is fake. It says the big claims outran the evidence. Read the parts on students from poorer homes and decide what applies to your child.

Then try the replay once, the day after the next loss, and watch what your child does with it.