Gary Seymour, sports@wolfrivermedia.com
The absolute worst preparation for life that a kid could possibly have, someone once said, is a happy childhood.
That line was delivered with tongue firmly in cheek, but in the joke was a wee grain of truth. A road strewn with rainbows and unicorns will eventually meet the junction of reality, and the consequences for youngsters attuned to the idea that life is an endless loop of fun and happy endings can be jarring.
Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker James Harrison stirred up a bit of controversy earlier this week by expressing his sentiments regarding the practice of awarding a trophy to every child for his or her mere participation in a sport.
Harrison posted on Instagram that the trophies his kids received for having played a season of youth football would be returned.
He stressed how unconditionally proud he is of his sons, but that “ … I’m not sorry for believing that everything in life should be earned and I’m not about to raise two boys to be men by making them believe that they are entitled to something just because they tried their best.”
His words evoked the question of where the line should be drawn between encouragement and overprotection of a child’s psyche.
The everyone-wins approach is thought to have begun with the boom in youth soccer over the past few decades, and has since also been in vogue for many 5-, 6- and 7-year-old kids playing in baseball and softball leagues. Some of those leagues do not even keep score in their games, the idea being that attaching a “loser” designation to the team scoring fewer runs would lay the groundwork, unnecessarily, to a poor self-image for those on the losing team.
Those who oppose this method say that a logical extension of the everyone-wins, trophies-for-all practice could also be applied to the classroom. If the goal is to shield kids’ fragile, developing egos, why subject them to a potentially humiliating hierarchy of being “graded?”
Proponents of awarding trophies to all participants point to the alarming obesity rate plaguing our country, maintaining that anything that might motivate kids to participate in athletics is a good thing.
It’s a fair point. But a commitment to physical fitness, like all aspects of a child’s life, falls to the parents. A kid who is allowed to park in front of the tube for seven hours every day munching Pinwheels and Fritos is destined for an inert lifestyle, and eventual membership into the ever-growing throng of obese adults.
Trophies or no trophies, a child who grows up imbued with a solid chassis of love and support can withstand a surprising amount of bumps along life’s path.
Psychologists have studied something called the Overjustification Effect, which holds that giving an external incentive to a person decreases his intrinsic motivation to perform a task.
The theory was put to three test groups of nursery school-aged children. All three groups were given paper and markers and told to create some sort of artwork. One group was promised to receive award ribbons afterward; one group was not told about the ribbons but was given them afterward; and one group was told nothing and given nothing afterward.
The group that was told about the award ribbon produced the least. The other two groups produced about the same, leading to the conclusion that expected rewards undermine the intrinsic motivation of people in previously enjoyable or worthwhile activities.
Trophies at the very least are a nice gesture, even the cheesy plastic ones that look like they could have come out of a vending machine. But at some point all boys and girls learn the difference between an empty token and something earned by having distinguished themselves among their peers, and of those keepsakes which ones are trinkets bound for the circular file and which ones are keepers.