To a child, a participation award is nearly as good as winning it all.
Little league sports teams don’t like to discourage the losers by not giving them some type of reward. In a lot of cases, the award for merely participating in an activity looks about as nice as the award for winning. Adults tend to be more competitive, rendering participation awards as meaningless.
These awards are nearly meaningless. The only achievement from solely participating is that the recipient had the initiative to at least try. While deserving of respect, does simply participating merit an award? And how does this affect children mentally?
The idea of giving grown adults participation awards is silly and most people can see that. Children, on the other hand, are usually given the award when they lose. Losing is a part of life, but shouldn’t be rewarded.
The greatest coach to ever exist in the history of time is failure. Nothing should motivate a person more than losing. Awarding children for failing detracts from the lessons that losing can have. The last thing that society should want to instill in the next generation is a feeling of complacency.
Participation awards make children believe that losing is okay and that a reward will be at the end regardless.
Telling children that losing is not okay may seem harsh, but the root of the problem is being complacent with losing. If the majority of adults had that mindset, nothing would ever get done. Millennials are constantly harped on for having a sense of entitlement, and to an extent this is true. But who is more to blame? The people who were raised that way, or the parent generation that enabled the sense of entitlement?
The award doesn’t award children for excelling and having talent at an activity or sport; it awards the child for having parents that cared enough to sign them up. This creates a warped sense of reality in the youth.
