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Lessons Taught in Defeat |
Photo CreditsWinning child with sports trophy or cup stock photo 450 × 300 - cutcaster.com
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Everyone’s a winner! Except when someone loses. It starts with the very young. Children sign up to play soccer, t-ball, flag football. They practice, they play, they win, they lose. Except they don’t. In today’s society, there are often no losers. Instead of keeping score during games, everyone who plays wins. Everyone who participates gets a medal or a trophy. No one experiences loss or learns how to be a good sport despite not being the best performer in the match. Children today are not prepared for the inevitable disappointments in life.
Are we doing children a disservice by not teaching them how to be good losers? Is it truly necessary to their developing self-esteem to lump everyone together in the same mediocre category of “good?” Do we really want to stop recognizing excellence simply because everyone can’t be excellent? Is it really wrong for everyone to be a winner? Maura Pennington, a contributor to Forbes, says it is. “It’s a horrible thing in fact because it sets us up for failure and disenchantment. Think of what a monstrous revelation the true nature of Santa Claus is. Now think how psychologically damaging it would be to find that your own self is a figment of your parents’, teachers’, and coaches’ imaginations.” When put that way, having everyone be a winner sounds like it can actually do lifelong damage to children who grow up not having any idea what are their strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, having everyone always win at everything they attempt fails to teach them how to handle the inevitable future disappointment. Ben Axelson quotes Kim Barron Skinner on syracuse.com “It is a life lesson. How do you teach your children to be good winners or good losers if they don't win AND LOSE?? I feel sorry for the kids that never learn disappointment. How will they handle life...such as not getting the job they really wanted, etc.???" Even if someone is able to go through life never losing, they aren’t really learning how to be a winner if they have never experienced life on the opposite side. Jonathan Fader, a sport psychologist, points out that giving everyone a trophy has another negative side effect, “Countless studies have shown that we’re more committed to an activity when we do it out of passion, rather than an external reward such as a trophy.” Children aren’t even learning to be fully engaged and committed if they are only participating for extrinsic rewards. If we continue to reward everyone, no matter how excellent the performance, we will build a society of citizens who do not know how to win with finesse, lose graciously, or participate out of a love for the activity. We’ll just be creating a cycle of conditioned response. Works Cited: Axelson, Ben. “Participation trophies: Should kids get rewarded just for showing up?” syracuse.com. Syracuse Media Group, 6 Nov 2013. Web. 9 Apr 2015. Fader, Jonathan Ph.D. “Should We Give Our Kids Participation Trophies?” Psychology Today. Sussex Publishers, LLC, 10 Sep. 2014. Web. 10 Apr 2015. Pennington, Maura. “How Do We Determine ‘Winners’ When Everyone’s a Winner?” Forbes. n.p. 17 Jan 2012. Web. 9 Apr 2015. |
from "Parents Ruin Sports for Their Kids by Obsessing About Winning," by Lisa Endlich Heffernan
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