Saturday, March 26, 2022

How Participation Trophies Corrupted America’s Culture: Children need to be taught they can lose and are not exceptional at everything; My Loser Kid Should Get a Trophy

Illustration by Greg Groesch/The Washington Times
How participation trophies corrupted America’s culture:
Children need to be taught they can lose and are not exceptional at everything
When I was a child, I was really bad at sports — all of them — and I learned how truly awful I was at athletics because I never won anything for my participation in them. Academics was a completely different situation — I did well, and most of the children who were good at sports did not — and we all recognized this because there, I garnered recognition, and they did not. It’s such a simple social structure that America used to have: Reward children for being good at stuff; don’t reward children for not being good at stuff.
This stopped happening because the left didn’t want to risk hurting anyone’s feelings — and the results of this are now the bane of our everyday lives.
The participation-trophy generation now believes that they’re right and significant all the time because they were never told otherwise. This hasn’t just shifted culture — it might have just irreparably damaged it. As adults, instead of participation trophies, people are rewarded with a tolerance of nonsense that would have never occurred at any previous time in American history.
There’s no greater evidence for this culture shift than the profession of journalism. At one point, it was one of the only means that we would be able to learn about the world and its happenings. We trusted — perhaps foolishly — that those in the field were working hard to actually bring us critical information. And while it’s very easy to observe the obvious biases that we’ve seen in the reporting of science and politics in our recent past, we should really step back and look at what overall emptiness our society is giving credence to. --->READ MORE HERE

The Daily Beast

My Loser Kid Should Get a Trophy:
My 4-year-old is starting soccer in the fall. Now, I don’t care how good he is at the sport. Win or lose, that kid’s coming home with a trophy.
This idea that we should reward children for merely trying their best? The majority of people are over it, according to a poll released this week by Reason-Rupe. An estimated 57 percent said “only winners” should receive a trophy for their participation in kids’ sports.
The poll also found that the more adults win at life, the more likely they are to want to keep the spoils of victory out of the hands of losers. The desire to withhold participation trophies increased with income, age, and education. While 55 percent of those making less than $30,000 a year came out in favor of participation trophies, only 23 percent of those at the top of the income food chain at $110,000 wanted trophies for all.
It’s not so surprising that groups were divided on political lines as well, and the further right respondents leaned, the less they were keen on prizes solely for participation. Progressives and liberals were most ready to hand them out, with 53 percent saying they should only go to winners. By contrast, 63 percent of conservatives and a whopping 80 percent of libertarians said only winners should get the prizes. Men also favored trophies for winners only over women, 62 to 52 percent.
People are really passionate about this trophy business. Because I couldn’t figure out what is so distasteful about a child getting a “good job” medal, I consulted the great explainer. And the argument, as far as I can tell from Google, goes that these baubles are the non-merit badges of the overly coddled “self-esteem generation”—that good-for-little pack who came of age in a time when everyone (and therefore no one) won. All this back patting, people say, has made our children lazy and created a sense of entitlement. It’s killed competition and produced a generation of young adults who can’t get into college or even apply for a job without help from mom. If this madness isn’t stopped, the children who win trophies for diddly today will be the leaders who capitulate to China (or Russia, or wherever) tomorrow. --->READ MORE HERE
Follow links below to related stories:

Trophies Are for Winning

Louisville coach rants about participation trophies

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