In our society, a disgusting trend has been emerging throughout the last decade or so. The paradigm of rewarding the winners only has slowly been giving way to this concept that everyone who makes any effort, no matter how big or small, needs to be rewarded. Frankly, this is garbage and needs to stop before things get out of control.
As a millennial born in 1999, I have been exposed to the idea of participation medals and awards throughout my life. More often than not, these awards manifested themselves in sports.
Since the tender age of five, I have been playing soccer. What began with Lil’ Kickers, an organization that develops children through soccer games and other social events, became something that took over my life. To put it, I had a soccer fever. Much of my youth was spent traveling in and around the state to various soccer tournaments in which my team and I competed. Given the smaller scale of soccer in Wyoming and the United States in general, the tournaments usually never featured more than six teams per division, with only extreme examples of regional tournaments having more.
At these tournaments, the structure often featured some sort of pool play, followed by knockout rounds until one team was left standing. As much as I would love to say that my childhood soccer team of the Casper Blades, eventually Casper United, dominated every tournament we went to, it would be a lie. We often found ourselves heading home late on Saturdays or early on Sundays because we failed to meet the cut. We were given no medals, no trophies. Nothing more than the support of our parents to comfort what almost always turned out to be a heartbroken child.
Would a participation medal have changed that? No. If anything, it would have served as a detriment to myself and the thousands of other young athletes around the world. The reasoning for this deals with the message behind the awards, along with the unrealistic nature of achieving something just for trying.
The main problem with the idea of a participation award is that it sends the wrong message to kids and gives them unrealistic expectations for their lives. People are most impressionable in their youth, which means that they will learn more about how this world works as a kid than as an adult. When a team/child fails, they are inherently taught a lesson. Whether that lesson is that they are not built for this type of activity or that they simply are not good enough does not matter. What matters is when these kids inevitably fail; rewarding them is telling them that they will be paid for failure throughout their life.
Something that every person alive has learned is that failure is very rarely met with a prize. For example, when the time comes to apply for employment finally and go through interviews, companies do not send home a heartfelt letter explaining that they wanted to hire you, but it was not your time. Instead, you often get a cookie-cutter explanation about how they decided to go a different direction and encourage you to keep looking elsewhere. No medals, no box of cookies, no grand explanations of regret. Just failure.
Another prime example of this still being practiced in athletics is the College Football National Championship. Every year, the two best teams in the nation square off for the title of ‘best team.’ Like all football championships, someone eventually loses. Those players are not then showered with praise about how they almost had it while being given a special trophy that says “Participant” in big letters. They get a ‘better luck next year’ and a long plane trip home.
Am I saying that we cannot console children who have lost? Not at all. In fact, I would encourage that behavior. But at its base, rewarding failure is not a practical outlook to be giving kids on life. Telling kids, “When you fail, you’ll still get rewarded” builds a sense of entitlement. Right now, we have enough entitled jerks running around thinking that the world owes them everything, and they owe it nothing. These are the types of people who give millennials a bad name in the first place.
So, I guess what I am asking of you readers, is that you consider the long-term implications that participation medals and participation awards are telling the youth of America. After all, most of us did not have anything like that, and we turned out just fine.
Right?
