By Christopher Canadeo

Imagine you are a proud parent whose child is participating in his or her first ever soccer tournament. Your child is around eight years old and is so excited to play well and win first prize. Medals go to the top three teams in the tournament with the best team receiving the most cherished medal. After a long day on the soccer field, your child’s team, unfortunately, comes in fifth place. However, at the end of the tournament, every player who was not part of the top three teams receives a participation trophy for their hard work on the field. When you get in the car to drive home, your child is smiling in the back of the car, holding up the participation trophy he won. But, is he a winner?

The answer is no. Participation trophies are toxic to our youth because they inhibit children from realizing the true value of winning. We value trophies because they are rare and special. Receiving a gold medal in the Olympics means you are the very best in that event. If everybody at the Olympics received a medal for participating in the event, why would they even bother to train? The participation trophy is a symbol of mediocrity and sends kids the wrong message.

Even at a young age, kids should aim high and understand that losing is a part of life. Not everybody can be a winner, and not everybody should be a winner.

Giving an award to a child just for showing up invites laziness and perhaps even encourages a losing attitude. Teachers do not give A’s on exams to every child in the classroom who shows up for the test, and frankly, they don’t give a passing grade either. Achievement must be earned, and thus, is much more rewarding to the individual when they achieve something worthy of legitimate praise.

I understand that losing can sometimes be hard, and that watching a child cope with that loss is not fun for any parent, but it is a part of growing up and progressing as a human being. Parents cannot be fearful of how their child will feel after they do not get what they want. Although no one likes to see a kid cry, creating an award to give to children who did not succeed is not a sufficient method for wiping away tears. Showing kids support and affection should not come at the expense of reality. Losing can teach a child lessons, and through those lessons a child can grow up and learn to work hard and succeed in whatever they would like to accomplish.

The bigger picture here is that as great as winning is, learning how to lose is just as important. There is value in losing because it motivates a child to work harder and hopefully do better. This desire to do better is healthy for the child and can push them to surpass their own expectations as to what they thought they were capable of. If you remove this idea of losing, you may also take away these precious motivational factors that push a child to success.

I also understand that the year is 2017, a year that has already seen violence in response to the inauguration of our president and mass protests or “marches” due to loss of a certain political candidate and the win of another, but perhaps if more people learned the right way to lose, this could all be avoided. Coddling children (and adults) is, and always will be, a poor response to losing in anything and is only useful in covering up reality.

Losing is hard, and nobody likes to lose. However, nobody wins at everything. Learning the right and respectful way to lose, not only in athletics, but in other facets of life is crucial to growing as a human being. For children, this sense of losing, which correlates to true pride in winning, may only be achieved through the abolition of meaningless participation trophies.

Christopher Canadeo, GSB ’19, is a marketing major from Long Island, New York.