Do Our Kids Get Off Too Easy?
THE
conventional wisdom these days is that kids come by everything too
easily — stickers, praise, A’s, trophies. It’s outrageous, we’re told,
that all kids on the field may get a thanks-for-playing token, in
contrast to the good old days, when recognition was reserved for the
conquering heroes.
Children
are said to be indulged and overcelebrated, spared from having to
confront the full impact of their inadequacy. There are ringing
declarations about the benefits of frustration and the need for grit.
These
themes are sounded with numbing regularity, yet those who sound them
often adopt a self-congratulatory tone, as if it took extraordinary
gumption to say pretty much what everyone else is saying. Indeed, this
fundamentally conservative stance on children and parenting has become
common even for people who are liberal on other issues.
But
seriously, has any child who received a trinket after losing a contest
walked away believing that he (or his team) won — or that achievement
doesn’t matter? Giving trophies to all the kids is a well-meaning and
mostly innocuous attempt to appreciate everyone’s effort.
Even
so, I’m not really making a case for doing so, since it distracts us
from rethinking competition itself and the belief that people can
succeed only if others fail.
Rather,
my intent is to probe the underlying cluster of mostly undefended
beliefs about what life is like (awful), what teaches resilience
(experiences with failure), what motivates people to excel (rewards) and
what produces excellence (competition).
Most
of all, it’s assumed that the best way to get children ready for the
miserable “real world” that awaits them is to make sure they have plenty
of miserable experiences while they’re young. Conversely, if they’re
spared any unhappiness, they’ll be ill-prepared.
This
is precisely the logic employed not so long ago to frame bullying as a
rite of passage that kids were expected to deal with on their own,
without assistance from “overprotective” adults.
In
any case, no one ever explains the mechanism by which the silence of a
long drive home without a trophy is supposed to teach resilience. Nor
are we told whether there’s any support for this theory of inoculation
by immersion. Have social scientists shown that those who are spared,
say, the rigors of dodge ball (which turns children into human targets)
or class rank (which pits students against one another) will wind up
unprepared for adulthood?
Not
that I can find. In fact, studies of those who attended the sort of
nontraditional schools that afford an unusual amount of autonomy and
nurturing suggest that the great majority seemed capable of navigating
the transition to traditional colleges and workplaces.
But
when you point out the absence of logic or evidence, it soon becomes
clear that trophy rage is less about prediction — what will happen to
kids later — than ideology: — how they ought to be treated now. Fury
over the possibility that kids will get off too easy or feel too good
about themselves seems to rest on three underlying values.
The
first is deprivation: Kids shouldn’t be spared struggle and sacrifice,
regardless of the effects. The second value is scarcity: the belief that
excellence, by definition, is something that not everyone can attain.
No matter how well a group of students performs, only a few should get
A’s. Otherwise we’re sanctioning “grade inflation” and mediocrity. To
have high standards, there must always be losers.
But
it’s the third conviction that really ties everything together: an
endorsement of conditionality. Children ought never to receive something
desirable — a sum of money, a trophy, a commendation — unless they’ve
done enough to merit it. They shouldn’t even be allowed to feel good
about themselves without being able to point to tangible
accomplishments. In this view, we have a moral obligation to reward the
deserving and, equally important, make sure the undeserving go
conspicuously unrewarded. Hence the anger over participation trophies.
The losers mustn’t receive something that even looks like a reward.
A
commitment to conditionality lives at the intersection of economics and
theology. It’s where lectures about the law of the marketplace meet
sermons about what we must do to earn our way into heaven. Here, almost
every human interaction, even among family members, is regarded as a
kind of transaction.
Interestingly,
no research that I know of has ever shown that unconditionality is
harmful in terms of future achievement, psychological health or anything
else. In fact, studies generally show exactly the opposite. One of the
most destructive ways to raise a child is with “conditional regard.”
Over
the last decade or so, two Israeli researchers, Avi Assor and Guy Roth,
and their colleagues in the United States and Belgium, have conducted a
series of experiments whose consistent finding is that when children
feel their parents’ affection varies depending on the extent to which
they are well behaved, self-controlled or impressive at school or
sports, this promotes “the development of a fragile, contingent and
unstable sense of self.”
Other
researchers, meanwhile, have shown that high self-esteem is beneficial,
but that even more desirable is unconditional self-esteem: a solid core
of belief in yourself, an abiding sense that you’re competent and
worthwhile — even when you screw up or fall short. In other words, the
very unconditionality that seems to fuel attacks on participation
trophies and the whole “self-esteem movement” turns out to be a defining
feature of psychological health. It’s precisely what we should be
helping our children to acquire.
The author of “The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting,” from which this article was adapted.