Last week, during the no-man’s-land period between school and camp, my oldest child, Jacob, 6, sat inside on a beautiful summer day and played in a chess tournament.

He had asked to play in the tournament, his eagerness largely due to the fact that in his last competition he had come in first place, beating 30 other kids his age. He had the taste of victory and a 3-foot-high trophy. Why wouldn’t he want to play in another tournament?

I sat in a side room with the parents of other children who were playing and was relieved to find the atmosphere relaxed and stress-free. Almost immediately, the mother of Jacob’s greatest rival, whom he had beaten to secure his recent victory, told me that she didn’t even know how to play chess.

“I know how the pieces move, but that’s about it,” I told her.

We hadn’t met until then, although our boys played all year together in a weekly chess club. We chatted easily and instantly were friends. It was clear that neither one of us was really concerned about the outcome of the tournament.

But neither one of us was able, either, to figure out what was going on during our sons’ long match against each other. The curiosity was killing us. We flagged down the man who runs the tournaments after we saw him observing their game, and he filled us in.

“Alex started off the game strong, but Jacob hung in there. And then Alex blundered and Jacob was all over him. Jacob can be brutal.”

I don’t even remember registering a sense of happiness. Alex’s mother and I quickly got back to our chitchatting.

But then, 10 minutes later, Alex ran into the room, arms pumping the air with victory, and Jacob slinked in behind him, dejected, looking at the ground. When he finally looked up at me, I could see that his eyes were glassy and he was just barely holding it together.

“Want a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup?” I asked him. Good move, I thought to myself. When he’s 50 and obese, you’ll know where his connection between depression and food came from.

I was desperate to hug him, as my new friend was hugging her victorious son, but knew that it would put Jacob over the edge. “Tough match, huh?” I asked, half looking at him, half looking at the poster behind him. “Yeah,” he mumbled back.

Less than a minute later, Jacob and Alex decided to go shoot some hoops in the school’s gym. And off they went with some other kids.

“He’s fine,” said a friend of mine who knows Jacob well. And as I watched him leave the room, trying to grab the basketball away from Alex, I could see that he was, in fact, fine.

But was I? Seeing your own kid suffer the agony of defeat isn’t easy. And it’s particularly not easy in a competition like chess, where the individual is fully responsible for the outcome. Jacob’s disappointment, it seemed to me, was less about the loss than it was about having come so close to winning and then having messed up.

In chess, there’s a specific word that refers to making a foolish mistake: blundering.

It has become so hard for parents of my generation to watch their children suffer losses that the people who run tournaments and leagues have taken to diluting the agony of defeat with vast quantities of trophies. In fact, in the tournament in which Jacob eventually came in second, there were trophies for the top 15 players in each division.

On top of that, there was a trophy, engraved chess medal, or ribbon for every single participant in the tournament. Talk about us all being winners!

Of course, I can understand what’s behind the flood of trophies. Young children and even older children should learn that often there can be more than one winner. A significant reason for encouraging our children to participate in sports is the self-esteem they can develop. Playing a sport teaches the importance of practice and hard work, not to mention that most of the time sports are good, old-fashioned fun. The elation that comes from winning a trophy is one that many of us can still remember from our childhood.

But shouldn’t our children also be learning that sometimes there really is a winner and a loser? And that just because you’ve lost, it doesn’t mean that you’re a loser?

Our job as parents isn’t to keep our children feeling happy all the time. Our job is to prepare our children so that they will become functioning, constructive members of the so-called real world. There isn’t, after all, a runner-up to an entry into a college, a scholarship, or a highly coveted job.

On the way home from the chess match I told Jacob that I could see he was disappointed that he hadn’t won. “These tournaments are really good experience for you,” I said, happy to have the conversation with Jacob in a setting in which he didn’t have to look me in the eye. “I know, I know,” he mumbled from the backseat, indicating the fact that we’ve had the “experience” conversation a few too many times.

“Winning really feels good,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said more clearly. “I’m going to beat him next time.”