“Everyone’s a winner.”
“You did your best.”
“It’s not about winning.”
“That’s unfair.”
Yes, life isn’t fair.
We live in a society, especially in the Bay Area, where children believe that everything should be fair and everything should go their way.
Should we blame the children? No. Blame the parents. The minds of children have been altered to think that their best is good enough and that they should get everything handed to them.
This is most likely due to the lack of punishments and the lack of honesty.
While working at a birthday party place for children, it’s much easier to analyze the parents’ tactics rather than just the children’s mentalities. It gets to the point where the actual birthday child can’t feel special anymore because “it’s not fair that they get a ball but my kid didn’t.”
Maybe if parents told their children “no,” they would stop expecting to get everything they wanted.
The sheltering of children also sparks from the whole “participation trophy idealism.”
Betty Berdan, a writer for the New York Times said, “We are all winners. This message is repeated at the end of each sports season, year after year, and is only reinforced by the collection of trophies that continues to pile up. We begin to expect awards and praise for just showing up — to class, practice, after-school jobs — leaving us woefully unprepared for reality.”
Rewarding children with trophies for merely just showing up sends a message that it’s not okay to lose. When children receive a trophy, it means they’ve won something, even if they received last place.
Why should children be rewarded for losing? It doesn’t make sense.
Instead, children should be taught to learn from their mistakes and to improve from them. Children won’t grow up to be self-motivated when they’re constantly being told whatever they’re doing is good enough.
Some feel that giving children positive reinforcement and making children feel good about themselves will build their confidence. However, in the long run, this is hurting children.
This kind of parenting already gave millennials and the upcoming generation Z a bad reputation. These generations were raised to believe that “life is fair,” but they are not at fault. They were molded this way by society and now are called lazy and dependent on their parents.
In a study done by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), shows that when children are overpraised, they are twice as likely to become narcissists.
Another writer for The New York Times, David Brooks, found in a study that parents in 2017 spend three times the amount of time being involved with their children compared to parents in 1975.
So, perhaps children these days are just being evolved by society, and their entitlement is just a side effect of growing up with social media.
Either way, children will not benefit from being handheld and given everything they want. The entitlement will fade as children face more struggles and more obstacles.
In the long run, a little tough love and honesty will benefit them a lot more than the participation ribbon they received in AYSO soccer when they were six.
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