Lately, participation awards have been getting a bum rap. Why should a young athlete be praised for his or her performance on the field if he didn’t give a performance? This might make thos athletes who excel feel badly about the effort they are putting out to make their team a winner.
Take the wildly popular and competitive world of soccer, for instance. Many soccer or football players as they are referred to outside the U.S., attempt to be the best at their particular position. For certain they strive to be a high scorer. And for that, it’s likely they will be rewarded in both the short and long run.
Says the professionals at Edco.com an American company that specializes, in part, by selling trophies, a successful team needs a company that’s dedicated to offering only the best selection of soccer trophies including metals, crystal soccer ball awards, and soccer resins for motivation and recognition of players, volunteers, and coaches. Perhaps it’s this last family of medals that closely resembles participation awards.
That said, it’s possible that there is room for participation awards. Taken a step further, some experts feel as though participation awards are giving kids more game. According to a recent report by Psychology Today, believe it or not, participation trophies are not a new or unique phenomenon. They first appeared in children’s sports around 100 years ago.
They have been used more recently to reward and encourage kids for participating in healthy and fun activities such as soccer and all sorts of organized sports. The awards are intended to recognize effort which kids can adapt to as opposed to having the intrinsically ability to alter the outcome.
However, since the 1990’s there has been a persistent and growing “drumbeat of eyerolling” and backlash against giving out trophies to children for no apparent reason other than their showing up on time. This kind of attitude is said to make kids “soft.” Participation awards are also said to cause resentment in those kids who not only show great effort in their sport, but whose skill and agility are a direct result in consistent team wins. In other words, why try so hard if everyone is going to be rewarded in the end, and therefore, end up at the same place? In no other arena perhaps aside from the business world, is a meritocracy so warranted than in the field of play.
That said, lots of people both with and without any expertise have weighed in with confidence in the belief that participation trophies will spoil a child’s competitive spirit and perhaps even make them lazy or too entitled to work for what they want out of life. In other words, every kid will feel like a winner, even if they don’t deserve to win.
Participation Trophies Do Not Fool Children
Anyone who believes that children mistake a participation trophy for winning first place, or that they are taking home a gold medal, is likely fooling themselves. It might even be considered a “ridiculous notion.”
Today’s kids are far smarter than that. They are more aware of their social surroundings than any generation prior. Kids involved in sports are well aware when another kid has far more skill than they do on the soccer pitch, football field, or court. Simply put, a participation trophy says one thing and one thing only: it was great for you to be here today supporting your team. It does not say that everyone has just taken first place or won the match.
Putting organized sports aside, the informal play kids get involved in said to come with plenty of winning and losing. This includes video games, board games, impromptu games of tag, plus endless rounds playground fun like kickball or boxball. Some children get solo parts in this type of play, and others do not.
These opportunities do not go wasted. Whether the kids know it or not, the children are learning about their strengths, abilities, and vulnerabilities every minute of every day. This is an inescapable growing process and it’s not easy. This is why some experts consider the notion that participation trophies purposely keep children from experiencing the “real world” to be absurd.
Participation awards and trophies are engineered to recognize that children’s skill sets are vastly different. They also take into account the fact that we put kids in organized sports while they are young when their physical skills are still in considerable development and not yet clearly defined. Let’s face it, some kids mature physically far faster than others. A child who’s five feet three as a freshman in high school could very well be six feet three by the time senior year roles around.
Beyond what’s considered standard “athletic” skills such as speed, muscle strength, plus-hand-eye coordination which can vary widely among kids of the same exact age, success in any given sport relies on a vast range of other skills. These include but are not limited to language, executive function, and social skills. Participation trophies and awards are meant to celebrate every single kid for playing a crucial role in the success of a team or an important activity, regardless of physical talent, overall agility, and innate skill level.
Celebrating Effort Affords Kids “Room to Fail”
In the end, according to Psychology Today, participation trophies might actually encourage kids to try new and difficult sports. Thus, the awards might give kids game. Being recognized for attempting something difficult, even if you aren’t physically engineered for it, can send an important message that there is great value in trying something you do not like or that you are likely to fail at.
Failure is not looked on favorably in the academic culture. But effort is looked upon as a key strength. Encouraging kids to try and fail at certain sports can provide a critical lesson in building and securing their confidence in both the short and long-term. It’s all about growing, learning, and discovering what you might excel at naturally and what you might not possess the physical skills to succeed at.
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