Forget Trophies Let Kids Want To Lose Analysis

Competition has become an ancient element of humankind. For as long as anyone can remember, there has been sports, debates, fairs, and many other forms of competition. The Olympics are a worldwide tradition that bring every country’s best athletes to compete for elite recognition. Those who make the top three, receive medals for their accomplishment. This happens in smaller competitions all over the world. Children are going out and participating in sports, and the winners receive trophies while the losers walk away with nothing. Some people feel as though this is not the way sports should go and have started to change things. They have completely set aside the idea of winners, and now give everyone a trophy for participating. Society has …show more content…
to Lose,” describes why children should not be given participation trophies. Giving trophies to every participant indirectly teaches children that losing is not acceptable and everybody needs to be a winner. She describes how dangerous this can be to children. They can take too much praise in the wrong way, developing severe vanity. Others might have bad self esteem and feel as though they can’t be as good as their peers. Receiving the trophy simply causes them to feel even worse about themselves. People need to let kids realize that losing is a part of learning and further developing their skills. Merryman uses strong reasoning to support her claim through past studies. She states, “In a longitudinal study, when parents overpraised their children’s performances, their children were more likely to be narcissistic two years later.” This logos supports her claim in a manner that informs parents, and others that may be concerned, that overpraising children does more damage than good. She uses other factual evidence to declare that children with poor self-esteem feel as though they can’t live up to what is expected to earn a trophy. Using evidence and recent studies, Merryman makes her claim more convincing. Towards the end of her article, she makes the influential point that praise goes beyond the physical trophy. When she directs the attention of her audience towards the natural …show more content…
Some believe that participation trophies send a destructive message, while others believe that they are a form of motivation and inclusion. Merryman describes how there is something valuable to be learned through failure. She declares, “We’re teaching kids that losing is so terrible that we can never let it happen.” She presses the need for parents to let their children lose, and encourage them to find a way to use that loss to improve. Then, Priceman explains the benefits of such trophies. He believes that people must go through levels of accomplishment before reaching true success, and that participation trophies are similar to stairsteps to the top. Furthermore, he implies that people have control over the effects of participation awards, saying, “The whole notion that we are creating a nation of wimps because we hand out participation trophies is only the case if we want it to be.” In saying this, Priceman is telling parents that they have brought this issue upon themselves. Finally, Berdan frowns upon excessive distribution of awards. She describes, “When awards are handed out like candy to every child who participates, they diminish in value.” A young athlete herself, she describes how seeing everybody else receive the same trophy she received made the award less special. Merryman and Berdan would find it easy to contradict Priceman, due