Children Are Our Future

“Our greatest glory consist in not ever failing, but in rising every time we fall.” (Oliver Godsmith) The children of todays society will never know the true meaning of this quote or what its like to fall and get right back up to try again. Many say if you don’t award your children for participating, they’ll choose not to participate and won’t get anything done. As a parent it’s hard to see your child fail considering you want nothing less than the best and to see them happy, but they should not be entitled to a trophy just for showing up and going through the motions.

The millennials have been called everything from coddled to just downright spoiled. Their overal attitude is horrible, always thinking they know whats best and whatever they do will be accepted and rewarded. This, however, is through no fault of the child but of the parents and caregivers that raised them. A writer from the Amrican Academy of Pediatrics states, “From California’s soccer fields to the basketball courts of New York, sports-league organizers are beginning to question the practice of congratulating every kid on every team just for putting on a uniform.” This just shows that people can see what participation trophies do to children. By giving them an award for participating and going through the motions will kill their entire motivation and want to do better. With these participation trophies they will fail and not kow how to handle it. With participation trophins they’ll never learn to fail, without failure they’ll nver learn to succeed.

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Just as eveyone says, the children are our future. If we continue to hand out awards for participatinon, they’ll never learn and give up as soon as they are unable to complete a task. Technology doen’t make anything better as they get frustrated if something doesn’t pop up as fast as they would like. The millennial generation is “electroniclly sophisticated” as Julie A. Ray from the Association for Childhood Education International states. With as many technological advancements as ther are in the world today, very few people have patience and it’s getting worse as time goes on. Having no patience is also a factor in weather anyone will continue to fail and succeed or just fail and never try again and expect a reward for onece again, going through the motions.

You will never learn to do things to the best of your ability if you don’t ever fail. Part of being human is learning to accept the fact that you will fail, weather it be one, three, ten, or even a hundred times before you succeed, you will fail. Michael Jordan, a retired professional basketball player and well reapected rolemodel, says, “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” Jordan was not handed a trophy for missing 26 game winning shots, he was awarded a trophy for working hard and failing. Even though he failed he never gave up. He pushed and pushed and worked everyday until he was succesful, until he was able to make those game winning shots that everyone was depending on him for.

“When we’re not feeling overwhelmed,” one ‘highly sensitive person’ (HSP) told a reporter for a California newspaper, “we can experience joy and love much more deeply than the nonHSP.” (Christine Rosen) Raising children on paticipatin trophies will give them a higher risk of becoming a HSP. They won’t know how to handle the conditions of life as it can be fast paced. In the real world, there is no one to hold your hand or tell you what to do and how to do it. You have to learn from your mistakes as well as everyone else’s. If you are awarded a trophy for showing up and just being there and participating, you won’t learn how to make a mistake and if we continue to hand out trophies like its candy, no one else will learn to make mistakes either. Once you are an adult and you’re out on your own and you make a mistake and you fail, you’ll think that its all going to be okay, someone will come and fix it, once you realize no one is there to fix it and no one is going to be there to tell you it’s okay, you’re going to feel like a failure, something that you’ve never felt before because for your entire life, everything has been handed to you.

Handing out trophies like its going out of style is a big mistake. Children are our future, raising them on participation trophies will improve nothing, do nothing but destroy children and their future. As soon as they fail and realize that it’s not okay, they will no longer be confident in themselves or in anything that they do. Part of success is confidence in failure, knowing that you will succeed if you just try again , even if you fail more than you’d like to admit. You will never get anywhere if you never try.