Milo and I were standing in the living room when I proposed my plan: Let’s play catch and try to count how many times we can toss the ball back and forth.

“Yeah,” Milo said, excitedly. He paused. “I’ll catch more than you.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. I’m not worried he’s going to become one of those jerks, the guys who throw elbows during pickup basketball games and suck the air out of every conversation because they approach everything as a power struggle.

I also hear plenty of Milo’s friends, especially the firstborns, talk about winning, with the sense that it’s good but without any real understanding of what it means or why.

I’ve already done my part to promote the value of competition, almost completely unconsciously. I’ll talk about whether the San Francisco Giants just won their game. He knows that someone is going to be elected president and someone else is not. He hears me talk about my tennis matches, and not just whether I’ve played well.

But even researchers who aren’t big fans of battle metaphors that highlight the zero-sum nature of some forms of competition acknowledge that competition is an inescapable part of life.

John Tauer is a psychology professor at the University of St. Thomas, in St. Paul, Minn., where he studies competition and coaches the men’s basketball team. “When I hear solutions that say let’s eliminate competition,” Mr. Tauer said, “that’s not realistic.”

“Not everybody gets to be a doctor,” he added, by way of example. “You don’t get away from competition unless you go to a system where everybody gets to do what they want whenever they want.”