It’s happened far too many times. Maybe I’m waiting in line getting coffee, walking in town, or anything else really, and I hear it the distance. It’s so faint I can barely hear it, but I know it’s there and I can see it play out in my mind. A grumpy old man looks up at a TV playing the news or, more rarely, is actually reading the newspaper, and groans. “I don’t want to see a country run by a bunch of kids who all got a trophy growing up.” Ah, the sweet sound of election season.

I’m not sure how that line always manages to get brought up around me, maybe they came up with it years ago and have just been waiting to use it. It’s something I’ve seen constantly thrown in the face of far too many politically active youth. The main issue isn’t that they were the ones issuing the trophies and we never asked to receive them, though it’s worth mentioning. It’s not even that this is such a repetitive argument. My main qualm with this line is that it perpetuates a myth.

The people who say things like this don’t actually have a problem with a bunch of ten year olds receiving little plastic trophies that only prove that their parents paid for them to play peewee softball, or at least I hope they don’t because that’s a very strange thing to be mad about. What they are really saying is that the people who grew up this way are subsequently entitled and are more concerned with everyone feeling like they did something rather than actually doing something. This is probably true for some people, but to be fair I’ve met older people who have this same attitude so I doubt it was the trophy’s fault.

It’s no secret that I was the recipient of many of these participation trophies, and I’m probably the reason a lot of my teammates only got these tiny plastic mementoes. Basically, I think I’m a pretty good example of what happens when you give everyone a trophy. The idea is that we will all feel accomplished, we tried our best and that was just as good as everyone else. That’s exactly how it worked, when I was six years old and would have been just as happy getting a random happy meal toy.

However, these participation prizes don’t stop at age six, they will continue into middle school. The effect quickly fades. Usually by the time we get to third grade, we’ve figured out the trick. All the adults around us are smiling, telling us how good we did, but we know that we didn’t win a single game and there’s another team on the other side of the gym being told the same thing with even bigger trophies. We did not learn that doing our best was good enough and warranted reward, we learned that adults will lie to make us feel better.

This is a hard pill to swallow when we’re 9 years old, so we ignored it, some longer than others. All the while, we started to doubt our real accomplishments. Being an honors student, I can’t speak for everyone, but I know that this effect lasted well after middle school. Yes, we received praise from our teachers, we were told we were doing the best we could and we should be proud, they gave us little certificates to show everyone how good we were, but in the back of our heads we were still on the wrong side of the gym. A part of us will always think like the 9 year old who knows they weren’t the winner but no one would tell them.

I’m not saying they did this on purpose, they meant well. I’m not saying I know a better way to raise all these children, but if we continue to sugar coat it nothing will ever change. However, if you take nothing else from this article, remember this: none of this is our fault. We didn’t ask to receive a prize for having fun and we didn’t ask adults to tell us we were good when we weren’t. Maybe that was a mistake, but it wasn’t our mistake and there is no reason to throw it in our faces whenever we want to make a change.