Let me paint a picture of a playdate for elementary school age kids that I was hosting as a mom who was new to my neighbourhood. Like most playdates, it was ending in tears. The eldest child, a boy who has now graduated high school, was 12 years old and being comforted by his mom. My own son, aged 6, had already lost interest in the game the group was playing and was amusing himself by throwing himself at the couch repeatedly. Only two kids were still at the table with me, my 7-year-old daughter and another 6-year-old girl. The only unusual thing about this playdate was the game in question. My friend and I had just taught five kids how to play poker. And even though there were some tears and disinterest from the boys after losing poker chips that were made of chocolate that I’d bought in the bulk section of my grocery store; the girls were getting it. Some fire had lit inside of them that caused these young girls to strategize, hide their smiles behind a pair of Aces, and boldly run bluffs to score piles of chocolate from their brothers and from each other.
Obviously, poker wasn’t just a random game picked off the shelf for the precious kids in my life. I’d gone through the trouble of preparing for the game and figuring out how to teach it to youngsters. My first job, at age 14, was in a game store teaching the customers how to play all sorts of games, so I felt prepared. I’m also a former schoolteacher, and even though this was back when Poker Power was probably just a twinkle in Jenny Just’s eye, I already knew that learning this game was life changing. I wanted my kids to have the same power that poker taught me. In a world where my young kids had been insulated from any sort of defeat in a game (their ice sports games were not even scored and their elementary school’s field day gave everyone participation ribbons), I wanted them to know something that it takes experience and wisdom to know: Suffering a loss doesn’t make you a “loser” if you learn the lessons from those losses.
Baked into the game of poker are so many lessons from which kids can take away big wins. Poker gently teases out our natural reactions when we face losing, winning, or simply being perceived correctly or incorrectly by others. Like a rock tumbler, it smooths out all of our rough edges by forcing us to confront them one at a time. One of the lessons for that first playdate was about the difference between lying and bluffing. When elementary-aged kids discover lying, they try to learn from it by treating it as the solution to every problem until they run into natural consequences. At which point, they may still struggle to see the nuance between being trustworthy and reliable for your friends versus being an over-the-top tattletale or refusing to keep even a birthday surprise a secret. I remember when my lawyer friend taught his young daughter how to argue, I told him it would bite him back when she was a teenager. Part of me wondered whether teaching my young kids to bluff would come back to haunt me when they were teens.
These soft skills are notoriously difficult to teach in a school setting. Kids are told that, in some scenarios, they should “fake it until you make it,” but without any guidance about when that crosses the line into dangerous self-delusion or cultural transgression. Poker might be a harsh teacher sometimes, but I believe it has made my kids stronger. My daughter, now 13, has graduated to playing with the adults at my house on game nights. She has also learned those tough lessons about honesty through playground friendships like most kids, but she has a more rich and nuanced understanding of how telling all might not be the right play. It is beautiful to see her strategize, and yes, even bluff. When she goes off to college, I hope that she will have learned to bet on herself, even if her career trajectory might still just be a “draw” and not a winning hand.
Written by Dr. Alexandra Doc Chauran
