My 5-year-old cheats at board games and cries when she loses. Is that normal?

Yes, both are normal, and both are roughly on schedule. At five, fairness runs in one direction. A deal that shortchanges her is glaringly unfair. A deal that favors her is close to invisible. That is what the fairness experiments keep finding, and the gap does not close until around eight. The tears are a separate thing, and simpler: she lost something she wanted, after twenty minutes of wanting it.

Nothing here will make a five-year-old lose gracefully. The aim is smaller. A game that ends without anyone being told they are a bad sport.

What the fairness studies actually found

Two studies sit under this, and neither of them is about board games. Hold that thought while you read them.

In 2011, Peter Blake and Katherine McAuliffe put children aged four to eight in front of candy splits and let them accept or turn each one down. From four, children rejected the splits where they got less than the other child. Only the eight-year-olds also rejected the splits where they got more. Getting less stings early. Getting more takes another four years to register as a problem at all.

Fehr, Bernhard and Rockenbach found the same shape in 2008, in Nature. Most of the three- and four-year-olds they tested behaved selfishly when candy was shared out. Most of the seven- and eight-year-olds preferred an equal share. Five sits in the middle.

Here is where I have to stretch. Both studies are children allocating candy in a room with a researcher. No dice, no rules, no losing in front of a parent. Nothing in either one tests a game, so I am inferring rather than reporting, and I would rather say so than dress it up.

What the arc does explain is the precise shape of what you are seeing. She moves five spaces on a three and it barely registers. You move four on a three and the table erupts. Same child, same rule, one direction only.

The crying and the cheating are two different problems

They arrive within a minute of each other, so they get treated as one thing. They pull apart quite cleanly.

The cheating is the fairness asymmetry. It is not aimed at you, and at five, bending a rule in her own favor is not lying to you. Ask her later how the game went and she will often tell you it went fine, because as far as she can tell it did.

The crying is about the loss itself, and it is simpler. A five-year-old holds the frame of a game loosely. Twenty minutes of effort, a board she was ahead on, and then it goes. The game part is thin cover over a real disappointment.

Which means they want different responses. The rule-bending wants one flat line and no argument. The tears want a pause and nothing said about character. No child in history has cried less because an adult stood over them saying it was only a game.

Change the game before you try to change the child

What is on the table does more work than anything you say across it.

A game that turns on strategy hands the win to the adult every time. A five-year-old who loses eleven in a row and cannot see any route to winning will invent one, and the route she invents is the dice. In that situation the cheating is a reasonable answer to a badly matched game.

• Let luck decide it, not tactics. Dice, colors, a shuffled pile. With something like our wooden color memory game the pegs are hidden and a die picks the color, and I lose it regularly to people a quarter of my age.
• Let something physical decide it. In a stick-drop tower the sticks fall when they fall. Gravity is the referee, and nobody can be accused of anything.
• Play the board together. Cooperative games take the loser out of the room entirely. There is much less to cheat at when you are on the same side.
• Make it end in five minutes. A short game costs less to lose and there is time for another before bath. Long games raise the stakes of every single turn.
• Some evenings, no winner at all. A counting board like the wooden counting and fishing board is number work she can do beside you with nothing at stake, and there is more of that on the math and logic shelf.

Most of what fits this age sits in our 4-5 year olds range. A younger sibling at the table changes the sums again, and luck games are usually the fix there too, starting from the 3 year olds shelf.

What to do the moment she moves the piece

You have about two seconds, and the response matters less than you would think. Keep it small, and do not audit every move. A parent watching for infractions turns the game into a test, and she will start playing it like one.

• Name the rule once, flatly. "A three moves three." Then take your turn. No pause for effect.
• She moves the piece back, not you. Reach over and correct it yourself and you have taken the job off her.
• Skip the question about whether she cheated. It invites a denial, and then there are two problems and one of them is a lie.
• Announced rewrites are fair game. A child who declares halfway through that the blue squares now teleport is not cheating, she is designing. Agree to it out loud and play the new game.

None of that is evidence-based. It is what works at our table, and the worst evenings I have had came from turning it into a moment.

Should you let her win?

I could not find a study that tests letting children win, in either direction, so read this as opinion.

Throwing the game does not hold up. Five-year-olds read an adult's face far better than an adult's strategy, or mine does anyway, and a win she can tell was handed to her is worth nothing. It also teaches the exact thing you were trying to avoid, which is that losing must be unbearable if grown-ups go to this much trouble to prevent it.

Playing at full strength does not work either. There is no lesson in the eleventh loss that was not already in the second.

What I do instead is choose games I might genuinely lose, then play them properly. The win, when it comes, is hers, and she can tell the difference. A child who beats you at a memory game has actually beaten you. They are usually much better at it than you are, which is worth knowing before you sit down.

Practicing losing in small doses

She gets better at this by doing it often and cheaply. Four short games across a week beat one long one on Sunday. She loses more times, and each one costs less.

Lose out loud yourself while you are at it. "Ah, I wanted that one," and then move on inside a sentence. She is watching how long you dwell on it, and a parent who sulks for a minute has just shown her how long a loss is supposed to last. Stop one game earlier than you want to, as well. Tired and hungry is where most of the tears live, and none of that is about fairness.

Then offer the rematch without requiring it. "Again?" is a real question. Being made to play on after a loss is how a child learns to hate the game.

It ends on its own, mostly

Around seven or eight the second half of the arc starts to show. She begins to notice the unfairness that runs in her favor, which is a strange thing to watch.

Blake and McAuliffe's eight-year-olds turned down the split that gave them more. Five is early in that, so you have roughly three years of this, and a lot of normal variation on either side.

If the losing produces distress far out of proportion, or it is spilling into school and friendships, or you are simply worried in a way a blog post cannot settle, that is a question for your pediatrician rather than a toy shop.

Change the game, say the rule once, and stop treating a stage as a character problem. She will move five spaces on a three and look up to check whether you noticed. Notice, say the rule, take your turn. Then let her have the game.