When I was growing up, I always heard, “You can be anything you want to be” just as most other adults did. I also played several sports at the same time and attended the year-end ceremony where awards were handed out to the best players. Not only did the best players get awards, but the players who did absolutely nothing but play in the grass also received “participation” awards. In a perfect world, this would be an excellent way to encourage children and keep their self-esteem up. But the reality is that our world is far from perfect.
I am completely for building up your child’s self-esteem, but if you give them awards for areas in which they did not succeed, these kids grow up to be entitled — for lack of a better word — brats. Kids that are told they can be anything they want to be will grow up believing that it is realistic for them to want to become a math professor even though they know absolutely nothing about math and fail almost all of their math tests. They are in for a rough road when they start college and find out they don’t have the ability actually to become a kindergarten math teach, much less a college math professor.
It’s parents like these that cause their children to grow up in a fantasy world and not know how to succeed in life without someone by their side always telling them that they are the best, even if they are the worst. I am not saying that parents should tell their children they are horrible at anything, I am saying, however, that parents should set their children up for realistic expectations by letting them know it is OK to be worse at something than another child. Kids who grow up believing that they always deserve a “participation” award will never know how to earn something that they want. If sports teams and other organizations do not realize soon that they are only setting these kids up for failure, we will have a generation of lazy slackers that expect more than they will ever actually get. If teachers do not stop grading students based on the effort that their groups put in, they are going to learn that they can get away with not doing anything for the rest of their lives.
In the real world, nobody gets the same things. Equality is great, but when society starts trying to delegate an equal amount of success and skill, that’s when we all fail. Everyone is different. Diversity makes the world go round. We have to stop spoon-feeding these kids or they are going to end up in deep depressions when they stop getting recognition for doing absolutely nothing. Encourage your children to do the things they are good at instead of wasting time teaching them to work their hardest at something that they just simply do not have the skill or education to succeed at.
