Briefly: Participation Trophies
Sometime recently (I think it was a week or to ago), a coworker of mine was chit chatting with me. This was an older guy in my department, who was cordial with a higher-up in another department that I’m 95% certain is a full blown conspiracy theorist. Still, he doesn’t bring that shit up in our area, so we maintain a degree of coworker camaraderie.
Anyway, he says to me, “kids are so entitled these days, it’s cause of the participation trophies.”
And I laugh, and tell him, “dude, the ones we never asked for?”
And he got a little puzzled by it, and ended up rolling his eyes and going back to work. I didn’t press him, because I had shit to do and I didn’t care enough about maintaining a conversation with him. I do have thoughts on it, though.
Participation trophies are for parents that want to feel better about themselves for having an average child. It is the entitlement of parents, living vicariously through their children, that has brought it. It was never the kids.
In middle school, I was in the school band. I played clarinet very middlingly. At the end of the year, our band teacher had given out award certificates to the kids that performed exceptionally well and were going to have high chair placements.
And also to the rest of us. I think I got like “kindest player” or something goofy like that. It wasn’t cool, it was patronizing! I knew I was a bad player, if I didn’t get an award, that’s motivation to get better at it. I still never really got good at it, and at that point I wished I had learned a cooler instrument like a saxophone, but that’s irrelevant.
It’s silly to me that parents complain about something that parents created. Kids don’t care about participation trophies. It’s always the parents.