The Game Above the Game
In nearly every Bible story I grew up with, the person who rises first has to descend. Joseph, one of my favorites, gets thrown into a pit by his brothers, sold into slavery, and eventually imprisoned before he rises to help govern Egypt. Again and again, in the old stories and new, the way forward passes through some kind of depth.
I think life works like that more often than we would like. We spend a lot of energy trying to stay near the surface, but sooner or later life finds us and pulls us underneath. Some people spend a long time down there. Some get lost. But very little grows by refusing depth altogether. Most of us are reluctant travelers, and children are no exception.
Their first games are fairly shallow: peek a boo, hide and seek, little games of chase. These games never descend more than a stair or two down, but eventually play asks more of them. They get caught, they lose, they discover somebody is stronger, and more importantly, they discover that the other child has a mind of their own and doesn’t follow the script in theirs. For a child who has not had much practice with that kind of encounter, this can feel like a sudden opening into a much larger world full of other wills, embarrassment, aggression, competition, refusal, and the possibility of being overpowered or exposed. Jiu jitsu can take them there very quickly.
In fifteen years of watching and guiding children through play, I’ve watched children change. More of them seem to arrive with sensory challenges, learning differences, attention problems, and difficulty navigating other children, and I suspect the steady disappearance of physical, unscripted, rough and tumble play is at least part of the story. For many of them, their first real experience of deep play happens in my academy.
We call it deep play: play that is fully absorbing, physical, and right at the edge of what a child can handle physically and socially. It is a kind of call to adventure. Joseph has the pit. David has the wilderness. Odysseus goes into the underworld. Luke Skywalker enters the cave. The details change, but the invitation is basically the same: go somewhere you haven’t been before and find out who you are when you get there. Taught well, jiu jitsu is remarkably open-ended. There are boundaries, of course, but once children understand them, all the images and symbols they’ve absorbed from video games, cartoons, sports, movies, and stories start showing up in their bodies. They become superheroes, monsters, warriors, animals, ninjas, and mythological creatures. Things they have only imagined suddenly become physical.
As a coach, I’m trying to reach the deeper parts of the child: the thinker, the feeler, the imagination, the competitive and aggressive spirit living inside a very capable human being. Jiu jitsu gives them a play language for bringing emotions, aggression, fear, and ideas to the surface that might otherwise stay hidden. Within reason, they get to experiment with their own dysregulation. They get angry, excited, overwhelmed, competitive, scared, and then discover that the game can keep going. The techniques and positions become raw material. Children can bend them, combine them, misuse them, rediscover them, and slowly make them their own. Eventually that exploration becomes competence, and competence becomes enjoyment.
Plenty of kids dive into this world headfirst, excited by the door their parents have opened for them. Others barely want to touch the water. And much of what holds them back comes from parts of their lives I will never have access to. Most of the time, they aren’t resisting me or even jiu jitsu. They’re resisting what the game is about to reveal to them. Spend enough time watching, and you begin to notice something about the children we call socially awkward.
Play is still their primary language. What they avoid is the part of play that exposes them to other people.
When I say this, parents usually look at me sideways: Coach Jei, my kid isn't scared to do anything. He jumps off the couch, climbs everything, and bounces off the walls from morning to night. I don't doubt it, and they aren't wrong, exactly. But physical courage is not what I mean. A kid can be fearless on the monkey bars and terrified of losing a game of tag. What I mean is harder to see: the willingness to be caught, to lose in front of someone, and still play the game in such a way that the game can happen again.
Most of the kids at my gym love to play. About a quarter of our class is low-risk games and challenges, and the majority of kids have a blast with them. But for some kids, even these games push their little identities to the max. While everyone else is enjoying themselves, they'll try to get out of it, or call the game stupid as they clumsily fumble through it, find some way to destroy the game, or just not try at all. Other kids get through these games fine, but the minute the games evolve into jiu jitsu, the same behaviors show up, and now they punish their partner for it. Every kid has a depth where the exposure becomes too much. What matters is where that depth is, and what they do when they get there.
What I have been noticing is that under enough pressure, a lot of kids fall back on a much earlier form of play, one centered on immediate desire, low reciprocity, and escape from exposure. A two-year-old can grab the toy and run, cry when they lose, wander off when they’re bored, and the game carries on anyway, because the games of two-year olds are forgiving. Nobody is asking much of them yet. But games grow up. They pick up rules and turns and consequences and unspoken agreements about how hard is too hard, when to give something back, and what you owe the other people playing with you. A kid who is still reaching for the younger solutions at seven or ten eventually discovers that the games have moved on without them. And sometimes the other children have too.
I'm not the first to notice this. Almost a century ago, the psychologist Jean Piaget spent hours watching Swiss children play marbles. The youngest barely played with each other at all; they played side by side, each following their own private version of the rules. Only as they got older did the game become something shared, with rules everyone agreed on, argued over, and eventually figured out they could change together. The game, in other words, grows up alongside the child. The question is whether the child keeps up.
I see the same thing on the mats every week. The kids who struggle most at jiu jitsu are the ones who make up their own rules and do everything their way. There is nothing shared about it, because they are in their own world. Piaget had a word for this: egocentrism, a young child's difficulty seeing the world from anyone else's point of view. They’re still playing marbles alone, only now with a partner who never agreed to their rules. A lot of people think it’s cute, and for a minute it is. In a three-year-old, it is normal. In a ten-year-old, it is a problem. In an adult, it is someone nobody wants to play with.
You can see it start young. Elliot is four, and for a while he cried at the start of every class. His mom told me he would sometimes run and hide when it was time to come. It wasn't that he didn't want to play. He loved coming to class. You could tell by the little coy smile he’d try to hide when something caught his interest. What he couldn't handle yet was the idea of being tagged in a game we call Jiu Jitsu Virus. In his version of the game, you run forever and nobody ever catches you.
I get it. Being caught feels a lot like losing, and losing is a very big feeling when you're four. To Elliot, the game felt as deep as play could go, right at the edge of what he could handle and then some. But socially, tag is one of the first shared games children learn, and its whole bargain is simple: you chase, and you get chased. Most of his classmates had already made peace with that bargain and were running and laughing.
Elliot isn't doing anything wrong. But without realizing it, he is casting himself out and every time he refuses to be caught, he steps a little further outside the game his friends are playing. He’s far too young to see where that road leads. A child who falls behind his same-age peers in play development is at risk of becoming a social outcast, often through things he doesn’t understand yet. That’s why as coaches, we can't simply wait for children like Elliot to come around. Our job is to find ways to bring them back into the fold.
What Elliot hadn't learned yet is something every child who gets good at this eventually figures out, losing does not mean the game is over. In jiu jitsu, we practice that lesson every day through live training. My littlest students call these rounds "win games.” It sounds innocent enough, but my coaches know what the name means. If there is a winner, there is also a loser, and for many young children that possibility changes the entire experience. The win games are, almost always, the part of class that younger kids don't like. That's because, in their mind, they threaten their view of the world.
Who in the heck is this person that’s better than me?
Then everything else (the techniques, the drills, the laughing in between) fades into the background, and the whole art of jiu jitsu shrinks down to the moments of being tested. So when they say they don't like jiu jitsu, they don't mean the actual art. What they don't like is the exposure: a live game, another person trying just as hard as they are, and nowhere to hide from losing.
Take Carter, another boy in that class. Last week he lost a win game and afterward he sat with me for five tearful minutes, sure that he would never be good enough to win because he isn't strong enough. To him, the kid who beat him landed on his planet and stuck their flag in the dirt. My heart went out to him, we’ve all felt that sting before. If he tells his parents before his next class that he doesn't want to go to jiu jitsu anymore, I'll understand why. But I don't think it will be jiu jitsu he's avoiding. It will be that feeling he had after the game.
Parents, if you hear something like this at home, listen closely to what's really being said. Sometimes social isolation begins with a child learning to avoid the very situations that would help them belong.
I have a few kids who shut down the moment they think they can’t do something. Others become intentionally silly and stop listening, or all of a sudden act as though they don’t understand something they understood perfectly well a few minutes earlier. It can look like goofing off or disinterest, but often it is something more strategic: a way of saving face.
If I never really try, then I never really lose. If I make everyone laugh, maybe no one notices that I was scared to do it. If I pretend not to understand, then failure doesn’t say anything about me… right? These are clever little exits from embarrassment. The problem is that they also turn into exits from the group itself.
I suspect this is partly why so many kids disappear into video games, phones, and tablets. I’ve had plenty of parents bring in kids they can barely get onto the mat, kids who seem completely disconnected from their bodies and unsure of what to do with another kid standing in front of them. Digital play can be fun, competitive, creative, even social. But it reduces embodiment. Nobody can feel how strong or weak you are through a controller, or feel you panic, freeze, or fail to notice another person’s discomfort. Your avatar can be brave while your body stays hidden. Jiu jitsu does the opposite. It makes the self physically and socially legible, and that’s a much harder game to hide inside of.
What I wish I could make these kids see in that moment: I’m not interested in them being good at anything right then and there. I’m interested in them returning to reality. The children who improve are rarely the strongest, and rarely the ones who care only about winning. They are the ones who keep coming back after they lose, and who play in a way that makes their partners glad to go another round. That’s how a child actually arrives at winning, by staying in the game long enough to grow into it.
Andre, a boy in one of my older classes, shows what this looks like. He used to lose more than he won, but he kept going back out there, round after round, day after day. Some of the other kids saw him as an easy partner, so they wanted to go with him all the time. You might expect that to wear him down, but he isn’t fazed, which is precisely why he improved quickly. He got to play more than anyone.
I find this fascinating. Whatever the other kids thought they were getting out of choosing him, the way Andre plays, getting up, dusting himself off, and smiling, is an invitation. He doesn’t punish anyone emotionally for beating him. He doesn’t withdraw back into his own world. For some kids, looking foolish feels like social death, and it’s one of the biggest reasons kids quit jiu jitsu. Andre changes what losing means socially. He loses, and the game is still there along with his friends, his coaches, and another round. Without knowing it, he’s playing the meta game, and what he demonstrates is something children take a long time to learn: the kid most willing to look like a “loser” gets more opportunities to become good.
I can relate to this.
Growing up, I had a friend named Gabe Haskins, a local basketball star who went on to play professionally overseas for many years. One day nobody else was around, so it was just me and Gabe. One game of one-on-one at two o’clock in the afternoon turned into I don’t know how many, and suddenly the streetlights were on. Gabe beat me every single game. Some I barely scored in, others I was right there, but I kept checking the ball up every time with no loss of enthusiasm.
From our friends’ point of view the next day, Gabe beat Jei from sunup to sundown. From my point of view, I got to play Gabe all day. What one person sees as an afternoon of losses, the person preoccupied with play sees as hours of access to someone better. And to be honest, it probably said more about Gabe than it says about me. Gabe would play anyone, anytime, anywhere, and I doubt he got to spend most of his adult life playing a game only because he was talented.
Being desirable to play with creates opportunities. Opportunities create repetition, and repetition creates competence. That doesn’t mean being a doormat. It means being able to lose, be corrected, get embarrassed, and still return to the game. Andre is already learning it.
We have a name for this already. We call it being a good sport. It is a hard thing to explain to a six-year-old, and I have tried many explanations, but the one that works best is also the simplest: so other kids want to play with you next time. Well why should I care whether other kids want to play with me? Because eventually there will be a game that you haven’t entered yet that you will want to be successful at, and it may not be a sport. Sportsmanship is future-oriented behavior. The immature player only experiences the game in front of them. But there is the game, and then there is the meta game: the game above the game. Somewhere between the two, a child's character is being formed.
Most parents who bring their child to jiu jitsu are looking for this kind of character development. What they don't always know is how it actually happens. It happens in the reaching beyond the game and into the meta game. They are not buying armbars. What they want is transfer. They want the child who learns to lose gracefully here to handle disappointment better elsewhere. The child who learns to regulate force here to regulate anger elsewhere. The child who learns to stay in a difficult round here to stay in a difficult conversation years from now.
Not, I hope, the world’s best grey belt. Although I know it feels really rewarding to watch little Timmy crush his first tournament.
For that transfer to happen, it helps to notice that a child at play can be serving one of three masters. They can be trying to avoid the game, which protects them from losing and embarrassment in the moment but turns them into a spectator. They can be trying to win the game at all costs, which sometimes gets them what they want but leaves them with fewer partners and fewer invitations. Or they can be practicing a way of playing that will let them succeed in many games, with many people. The first two end up in the same place: fewer chances to play, and therefore fewer chances to grow. The third is simply the more adaptive way of meeting the world, and it still leaves room for all the good outcomes of the game, including winning.
But what is obvious to a grown-up on a quiet evening is not obvious to a child in the middle of a game of tag. If I'm honest, it isn't always obvious to grown-ups either. The third way asks you to kill off some of the things you thought you knew about yourself so that new information can take its place. It means playing the game honestly, with real effort and real intention: no coasting, no quitting halfway, no side quests, and no pretending something hurts to get out of a bad spot. The favorite at the gym is suddenly needing to go to the bathroom. It means sticking your neck out, knowing you might lose in front of someone, and allowing reality to revise you. That is exactly the exposure so many children run from and in their case, they don’t even know they are running.
So how does a child come to see it? In my experience, it starts in the body. Jiu jitsu requires rough and tumble play, which pulls children into the deepest end of the pool. And here is something I didn't expect to learn: you can tell, almost from the first class, which children know how to swim. Perhaps that is part of why parents bring them to me. They sense, without quite being able to say it, that something has been missing. I've come to suspect that missing this kind of play contributes to a lot of the social awkwardness I’ve observed on the mats.
Many of the socially awkward kids I meet simply lack practice. They haven't accumulated enough reps in the physical-social negotiations children learn through rough play: reciprocity, use of force, turn-taking, reading discomfort, repairing mistakes, staying in the game, telling an accident from aggression, how not to humiliate your partner, adjusting themselves to another person, and many other things. These lessons are learned through the body in rough and tumble play long before most children could explain them in words.
Physical education, done this way, is social education. And for children who haven’t had much of this kind of play, you have to teach these things deliberately. You have to help them learn how to stay in the game and handle exposure before their early experiences convince them that the game isn’t for them and they quit.
I learned this long before I ever coached a class. I grew up in the inner city, in a neighborhood where most kids didn't know how to play. Games ended in fights. Play ran too rough, and rough play invited retaliation. Plenty of kids were simply afraid to join in, and I can't say I blame them.
I remember a game of tag after church one Sunday. An older boy picked up a large rock and, in his anger, threw it at me like a major league pitcher. It struck me in the back, inches from my head. I have thought about that boy many times since. As the years went on, life was very difficult for him. I don’t think the rock explains his life, but I do think it revealed something that mattered. A child who answers a game of tag with a rock has missed something important about games: how to remain inside the game without destroying it. And so much of life is played there.
A job is a game. So is a marriage, a friendship, a conversation, a competition. Not because they are frivolous, but because they involve rules, reciprocity, roles, constraints, consequences, other people, and future rounds. The person who can only win by destroying the possibility of another round eventually runs out of people willing to play with them.
Back on my mats, the children who haven't had enough rough and tumble play, or in some cases have had too much of the wrong kind, tend to land at one of two ends. At one end is the child who is easily frightened. They often are strangers in their own bodies: hesitant in movement, surprised by contact, tripping over themselves, and colliding with other children because they haven’t yet learned how bodies move together.
At the other end is the child with no gauge for how much is too much. They go at weaker partners far too hard, and when the same force comes back to them, it feels mean, deliberate, unfair, and they cry. One child needs to learn, I can handle more than I think. The other needs to learn, other people can handle less than I assume. Neither child is bad. They simply haven’t put it together yet. But I won't pretend like their current strategy doesn’t have a social consequence: nobody lines up to train with them and if they have to, they don’t enjoy it.
And then, in the same class, at the same age, there are children who seem to be playing a completely different game. They ease off when their partner is struggling. They comfort a kid who is having a hard day. They lose with a smile, even though their pride might be hurt too. These are the children everyone wants to play with, and when I watch them I see those three masters again. Some children are still serving dominance or avoidance. Others seem to pick up the unwritten rules of whatever culture they step into, reading the room the moment their feet touch the mat. A child crosses the line once and never crosses it again. Another adjusts their intensity to the person in front of them, easing off with a newer partner and turning it up with a more skilled one. Often, no one has told them to. That is a remarkably sophisticated kind of social awareness. It is the third master at work: not merely learning how to play the game, but developing a way of playing that travels.
Researchers who study play fighting, like Sergio and Vivien Pellis, have names for some of this: reciprocity, role reversal, and self-handicapping. In play-wrestling rats, the animal with the advantage doesn’t always use it. It may give up a stable position so its partner can turn the tables, and roles reverse. Play isn’t simply fighting with lower stakes. The competition to win has to be restrained enough to keep the game going.
Children learn the same thing in rough and tumble play, and it’s what makes jiu jitsu so insanely difficult. Large parts of the art stay completely hidden from you if you never engage in reciprocity, self-handicapping, and role reversal. Some of my students want to dominate so badly that they forget they have to become just as good at escaping positions as they are at stabilizing and maintaining them. One day they will go against someone just as good as they are, and if they never learned those other parts of the game, they won’t have them when they need them. The student obsessed with winning can accidentally shrink their own environment and education.
This is why jiu jitsu is deep play and the students who understand this usually improve the fastest. Once it clicks, the rules stop feeling like restrictions, because the rules are what preserve the purity of the game and keep you in it longer. The child who is overly aggressive and the child who refuses to engage look like opposites, but neither is actually meeting the game where it is. One student tries to overpower the game; another disappears from it. One uses too much force, the other withholds themselves entirely. That’s the funny thing about students who eventually quit because they don’t like jiu jitsu: they spent more time negotiating with the demands of the game as if it were holding them hostage than actually entering it.
Self-handicapping sits somewhere between those poles, because it asks the student to stay fully engaged while deliberately giving something up. You can’t muscle your way through a hundred rounds with a hundred different partners, but the student who refuses to engage has the opposite problem: they never stay in the game long enough to discover what the fundamentals can do for them. One tries to solve everything with force, the other avoids the problem altogether. Both miss the same education.
When you hold back some of your strength, speed, and limit how much of your game you allow yourself to use without withdrawing from the game, you are forced to lean on the fundamentals instead: base, posture, connection, timing, and sensitivity. Not long ago, a teenage student told me he didn’t much like rolling with less experienced partners because he didn’t learn as much from them. I told him that I have only had lower belts in the gym to train with, and that the limitation has made me better at jiu jitsu. If I could learn to create difficult problems for myself with less experienced partners, there was no reason he couldn’t do the same. I suggested he handicap himself and give himself a harder problem to solve. His partner gets a better round, he gets a greater challenge, and over time it expands the number of people he can meaningfully train with.
The children everyone wants to play with aren't born; they're made, one round at a time. What we do at the gym, as best I can describe it, is take children as deep into play as they can go, and then a little further, just past the edge of what they can handle. Sometimes there are tears. Then we reel them back. We do this slowly, over months and years, with small corrections to technique, pace, intensity, and control.
For the child, it is a kind of exploration. What are bodies like? What can you get away with doing to them? And, more subtly: what can you do that won't get you in trouble and end the game? There is only one way to find out. You have to gradually accommodate yourself to the game, its rules, and the other people in it. If you understand those things well enough, you can behave in a way that gives you more opportunities to play.
Consider what the art continually asks of children. They hit the ground hard. They get squished. They end up face down. Their limbs are stretched a little past where they'd like them to go. They are squeezed until the air leaves them. And, just as importantly, they are allowed to do many of the same things to someone else. What they slowly learn is that all of this can happen to a body and still be all right, because this is the game, and there is a safe way to play it. That, to me, is the deepest invitation the game of jiu jitsu offers: I can teach you how to come very close to danger, discomfort, and another person’s force without the game ending.
Do you want to learn?
This is where confidence comes from, and I don't mean the loud kind. A child learns what they can withstand physically. Given enough time under the discipline, that knowledge seeps inward and becomes mental, then emotional, perhaps even spiritual. They learn the difference between pain and discomfort, between fear and surprise, between a real threat and something that only looks like one. It is a far more sophisticated education than "self-defense," and I suspect it is the real reason children, given half a chance, fall in love with this art.
Not every child gets that half chance. Some arrive with almost no experience of rough play at all. They are afraid of their own shadow, uneasy in their skin, and often already passed over by their peers. They can look inattentive, socially lost, and a little out of place, but I have learned to read much of that as fear: fear of the unknown. Sometimes it's the unknown win game Coach has planned for that day. Sometimes it's the unknown person they might become if they really try.
Their partners, often leagues ahead, grow frustrated as the game stops again and again, because every time it stops, they lose their chance to play too. And that is how the gap can widen. One child avoids the game because they are afraid of it, while the other children gradually stop inviting them in.
Avoiding exposure wears many masks. In some children it looks like aggression, a need to dominate. In others it looks like defiance. In others it is the fear of losing face, which keeps them from ever fully committing. And very often, beneath all the masks, it is plain terror. None of this is really playing the game, it’s playing around it. These are the children I sometimes work with for months before they can participate in even the most basic of games without trying to escape it, control it, or derail it.
And too often, these are exactly the children who get pulled out of jiu jitsu and of every other sport, because their parents conclude they're uninterested, unmotivated, just not passionate about it, and finally that nothing is for them. But I know these kids. Deep down, they want to be able to play. Pulled out too soon, they risk drifting further to the edges of the group.
I understand the impulse. But these are precisely the children we cannot afford to lose patience with. I've watched enough of these children come around to believe that pulling them out too soon is a mistake. Jiu jitsu can be for them, mainly because of the meta game. The techniques matter less than what happens around them: learning to play in a way that keeps the game going for everyone. That is exactly what these children are missing, and exactly what we practice every day. These kids aren’t simply uninterested, they’re learning how to stay in the game. And the ones who struggle the most sometimes are the very ones for whom the social education inside jiu jitsu is most valuable.
Confidence is not what allows the child to enter the academy. Confidence is what accumulates after the child discovers, repeatedly, that they can enter the game, be exposed, and survive it. Confidence is what they bring back from the depths.
Once a child learns how to play, how to enter a game, survive it, care about the person across from them, lose without withdrawing, win without destroying the invitation, and leave both people willing to play again, the lesson is no longer about jiu jitsu. They have learned something about living with other human beings. And from there, almost any game is open to them.