In a country that keeps score on everything, I've spent years teaching my brown son to win. A fencing piste is teaching us both that the real skill is what you do when you don't.
Blame Wednesday Addams. A few months ago my eight-year-old watched a couple of episodes of the show, saw a girl in black dismantle her opponents with a sword and an expression of total indifference, and announced that he would like to do that, please. My son, like a lot of children, I’m sure, had the belief that I had the skills to move heaven and earth for his desires, and in this case, I did. My brother, who was an athlete himself and has opinions about these things, told me to let him try. And because the algorithm is always listening and occasionally benevolent, an ad for a fencing club appeared on my feed within the week. Plus a fashion girlie, I can’t say I don’t love the outfit.
This weekend, somehow, he competes in his first real fencing competition. And I have spent the last few days realising that the lesson I’m most anxious about has nothing to do with footwork.
I know exactly where he gets it from
Some context about his mother. I played netball for my school and went on to represent Singapore at regional games. In my twenties, when we lived in the US, I became a competitive Spartan racer, which for the uninitiated means paying good money to crawl under barbed wire in mud and then describing it to friends as fun. I have always been muscular, taller and bigger than most Singaporean women, and I learned early that my body could be an advantage rather than something to apologise for.
Add to that the drive of an eldest daughter and the particular need to prove yourself that comes with being brown in Singapore, and you have the perfect recipe for an aggressive athlete. Which is what I was. Sport was where I put all my frustration, and I loved every sweaty, bruised minute of it.
So last weekend, when I sat at the side of the piste watching my son in a simulation competition, I was not prepared to be looking at a mirror.
He lost. And instead of resetting, he got angrier. His attacks got bigger, faster and sloppier. He started lunging at things that weren’t there. You could see the frustration running up his arm and into the blade, and every touch he conceded made the next one more likely. He was, quite visibly, a worse fencer angry than he would have been calm. And I recognised every second of it, because I have been that girl on the netball court, and I have lost games I should have won for exactly the same reason.
The problem was never his skill. It was that losing one point made him forget how to fence.
How do you teach a child who has to win how to lose?
Here is my complication, and I’m going to be honest about it because this column doesn’t work otherwise. I believe winning matters. And I believe it especially for brown children in Singapore.
Since my son was teeny, I have told him, in words he could understand at every age, that as a brown person here he needs to show up at 120%, because his 120% will often be read as someone else’s 70%. It is not a fair equation. It is simply the maths of his life, and I would rather he learn it at my kitchen table than in a boardroom at 25.
So how do you tell a child who has been raised on 120% that losing is okay? How do you say “it’s fine” without it sounding like “it doesn’t matter”, when you have spent years telling him that it does?
Singapore’s children are terrified of failing, and the data says so
It helps to know that my son is not an anomaly. He is a very normal product of a very particular place. When the OECD ran its PISA 2018 study, more than 70 per cent of 15-year-olds in Singapore reported being afraid of failing. Seventy-two per cent said they worry about what others think of them when they fail, markedly higher than the 56 per cent average across OECD countries, and 73 per cent said failing makes them afraid they might not have enough talent. Our own Ministry of Education, to its credit, has named this problem, saying it wants to help students develop the resilience to bounce back from failure and see setbacks as opportunities to learn and grow.
The fear isn’t really about losing: it’s about what losing says about you. And that, I realised, was exactly what I was watching on the piste. My son wasn’t angry because he’d conceded a point. He was angry because somewhere in his nearly-nine-year-old head, conceding a point had become evidence about who he was.
The psychologist Carol Dweck spent decades studying this. In one of her most famous studies, Mueller and Dweck (1998), fifth graders praised for being intelligent cared more about performance goals than learning goals, compared with children praised for effort. After failure, they persisted less, enjoyed the task less, blamed their own ability more, and actually performed worse than the children praised for effort. In other words, when a child believes a result reveals something fixed about them, failure doesn’t just sting. It makes them measurably worse at the very next attempt.
Swallowing it isn’t the answer either
My instinct, as a former aggressive athlete and a current aggressive Singaporean mother, was to tell him to just not show it. Keep a straight face. Don’t let them see you rattled.
It turns out that’s also wrong. Sport psychologists distinguish between two ways of handling big feelings: cognitive reappraisal, which means reinterpreting the situation so it feels different, and expressive suppression, which means hiding what you feel. In research on youth athletes, reappraisal was linked to happiness and excitement, whereas suppression was linked to more anger and dejection. The poker face I’d been about to prescribe was, in fact, a recipe for exactly the fury I was trying to fix.
Fencing, it turns out, is built for this
Here is the thing I love most about this sport, and the thing I wish I’d had as a teenager. After every single touch in fencing, both fencers walk back to their lines and start again. Every point has its own clean beginning. You don’t carry the last touch with you onto the strip unless you choose to, and the fencers who win, very often, are simply the ones who are best at putting it down.
That became my language. Not “it’s okay to lose”. Instead: reset. You lost the point. Walk back. Breathe. The next point doesn’t know what happened in the last one, so don’t tell it.
And then it all made sense to me, going back to the 120%: I told him that staying calm is not the opposite of trying hard. It is the trying hard. The boy who loses a point and comes back sharper is giving 120%. The boy who loses a point and starts swinging wildly has, in that moment, handed the other kid the match for free. And because I will never pretend to him that the world is fairer than it is, I added this: a brown boy who loses his temper does not always get the benefit of the doubt that others get. His composure is not just good sportsmanship. It is his edge, and some days it will be his protection.
He nodded, very seriously, in the way that children do when they have understood more than you expected them to.
The room he’s learning in
I found Capital Fencers through an Instagram ad, which is not how I expected to find anything meaningful, and I walked in expecting what I’ve come to expect from most competitive spaces for children in Singapore: parents glued to their phones, kids quietly sizing each other up, and a general sense that everyone else’s child is the competition.
Then, during the simulation competition last week, two older kids came up to me. Nobody sent them over; they were young teenagers, the age when most children would rather eat their own toes than start a conversation with an adult they don’t know. They told me my son was doing a great job, that I should go and watch him, and that he had great technique. Then they went back to their own bouts as if they’d done nothing unusual.
I have been a parent for almost nine years and an semi-sporty person for most of my life, and never once have two teenagers approached me, unprompted, to sing the praises of my child. I stood there slightly stunned, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.
Kids don’t do that on their own. They do it because the adults around them have made it normal, because somewhere along the way the coaches built a place where cheering for a younger kid is simply what you do. If the PISA numbers are right, and our children are mostly afraid of what losing says about them, then growing up in a room where the older kids go out of their way to tell you you’re good might teach my son more about losing well than anything I can say at the dinner table.
This weekend
I don’t know how he’ll do on Friday. He might win some, he will almost certainly lose some. I’m told I will not be allowed to shout, which, for a woman of my volume, is its own act of emotional regulation. What I’ll be watching for isn’t the scoreboard, it’s the walk back to the line after he concedes a touch. Whether his shoulders drop. Whether he breathes. Whether the next point starts clean.
Because I spent years believing that being a winner meant never losing, and it took watching my son fence to understand what my coaches were probably trying to tell me all along. The winners aren’t the ones who never lose the point. They’re the ones who lose it, walk back, and start again as if it never happened.
I still want him to win. I just want him to know that the reset is part of the 120%, and that nobody, not even his mother, gets to the top without learning how to lose on the way.
