You either win or you lose, you get the medal or you don’t. The philosophy behind a medal or trophy is simple, it belongs to the winner, and winner only.
In my own opinion, this is important because a child needs to learn that in the long run to be good at something requires a lot of hard-work and it is time consuming. This constant focus on giving medals, giving public praise … I think over time, this is giving this message that failure is so terrible we can’t let you experience it. We can’t even address it. We have to pretend that you always win. Supporters of participation trophies argue they serve as mementos of the time and effort children put into certain activities. In addition, they boost involvement among children and build their self-esteem, causing them to be bolder and achieve more.
While that sentiment sounds nice, my argument is that participation awards actually has an opposite effect. The adults tend to overpraise children who struggle, are shy or have low self-esteem, which has been proven to cause those children to withdraw because they can’t live up to their own hype.
As for those with high self-esteem (in the words of few of my friends, Yours truly included), participation trophies help create narcissistic children because they view the awards as vindication that they’re truly as great as they see themselves. I think what does for me, create anger because I don’t want to be appreciated for losing, If I have lost, I have lost. I don’t need a constant reminder of that. Like in all honesty, why would I need it.
What I want is my friends who really take pride in their pansy ass participation letters is to realize it takes a long time to get good at something, and that’s OK, nobody expects perfection from the get go. We don’t expect them to be constantly winning. If you lose, that’s fine. If they win, that’s fine. But we should not be interested in results. As a person who is driven by competition (actual competitions and not self created in the mind competition to beat someone in the class in grades, cause that is JUST PETTY), my goal is always to come to this conclusion how much have I grown from this experience and have I learned enough to fare better the next time around.
Once children master a skill, they won’t need manufactured praise to tell them they did a good job because they’ll know it and feel a great sense of accomplishment.