Dr. Phil McGraw unleash his wrath on some parents whose child could not handle being the spelling bee loser. The drama began when 12-year-old Amara Chepuri misspelled a word not included on the official NFL study list at the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Apparently, instead of using that opportunity to teach their little girl how to handle failures in life, the parents hired an attorney to change the regulations of the fake competition. Dr. Phil dragged them onto Twitter to say, “There are winners and learners in life; I don’t think that applies in this case.” Oof.
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The tweet got a blaze with responses from people siding with Dr. Phil and counter accusations that he himself is a part of the problem. One such user, UnabashedLibertarian, questioned, ‘People who can’t admit they lost?’ with a link to an item on sore losers. DEAD, on the other hand, fired a potshot at Dr. Phil himself, apparently implying that the word was ‘charlatan’—saying that ‘The not really a doctor Dr. Phil is America’s second most famous charlatan.’ Savage.
Thus, it wasn’t everybody who would consider the remark funny. Some were seriously incendiary in their responses, bt3r_1nf0 saying Dr. Phil was doing ‘psyops’ to make people accept inequity, pointedly remarking that if rules were violated, parents had every right to protest. Keaton Hobby refuted by saying, ‘Kids need to learn how to lose and grow from it. Suing over a spelling bee? That’s not how you build a winner or a learner.’ Preach.
Even crazier? This whole fiasco is not about the child but about parents not wanting their child to suffer from failure. MarycarmenKelly said, ‘I thought the study list was to teach phonics, not to give every possible challenge. Otherwise, it’d be called the Memorizing Bee.’ Exactly. Since when did spelling bee become court?
Thus, since the internet is the internet, someone would have to add themselves to the mix. Cindi1218 quietly suggested Trump by asking whether this was akin to his failing to acknowledge that he lost in 2020. Oh, the classic Twitter move–take any random topic and twist it to be about the ex-president. Meanwhile, Natalie Winters decided to thank Dr. Phil for ‘airing my CNN smack down,’ which, okay? Totally out of left field there, but alright.
And the real question here: what do we teach children when they sue instead of learning to deal sometimes? Andrew T. smacked the nail back in time: ‘Remember them old days whenever you lost you sucked but then you got better at it to show them MFs.’ Just facts. Losing builds character. It’s not the end of the world-it is the beginning of getting better.
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At the end of the day, that tweet from Dr. Phil accomplished exactly what it was meant to do-it stirred up knife fights. Whether one agrees with him or thinks he’s crazy, the epiphany here is that this spelling bee drama is bigger than one word. This is about how we cope with our failures, and in this day and age, a couple of individuals failed to deal with failure, and maybe nothing’s worse than a kid “spelling ‘pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis’ on the first go.
