Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Thoughts..

We live in a society today, where every child gets a trophy.  We play baseball.  At the end of the season, we have a dinner and each child gets a trophy.  Or in football.  Soccer.  Basketball.  Blah, blah, blah.

Then the kids get to an actual competitive team where there can only be one winner.  Or a classroom game where no one feeds you the right answers.  What happens?  Meltdown.  Screaming at the adult, "you should only give me questions I know the answers to!"

What are we doing?  Are we creating a society of children who don't know how to lose?  Are we teaching that it doesn't matter how hard you try, as long as you show up, you should be rewarded?  How will that look in the workplace in 20 years?  Oh sorry that your brakes just didn't work.  I don't actually test them out before selling the cars, we just assume that whatever, it's good enough.  It's not my fault you overdosed on the correct dosage of medicine.  Someone else should have made sure it was right. 

What are we teaching by rewarding attendance instead of hard work?  Yes, we want our kids to feel good about themselves, but when I played sports as a child, we didn't all get trophies, yet we still felt good when we worked all season and wow, look how far I can hit/throw the ball now!

I don't know the answer.  I just wonder, am I the only one that sees a problem with this?  Give me your thoughts....

1 comment:

  1. If sports organizations are going to continue rewarding participation, we as parents must teach our children that sometimes in life you lose. and it's okay! Even if you are smart and work hard, you may not get the job you interview for. Teach them how to keep working hard even in bad times and maybe we won't have 5 million people on welfare.

    It used to be that when you were on welfare, you were required to pay that money back. Maybe if the government started collecting money "lent" during hard times, the people abusing it would stop.

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