5 5 2014 Do Our Kids Get Off Too Easy? - NYTimes.

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SUNDAYREVIEW | OPINION
Do Our Kids Get Off Too Easy?
By ALFIE KOHN MAY 3, 2014
THE conventional wisdom these days is that kids come by everything
too easily stickers, praise, As, trophies. Its outrageous, were told,
that all kids on the field may get a thanks-for-playing token, in contrast
to the good old days, when recognition was reserved for the conquering
heroes.
Children are said to be indulged and overcelebrated, spared from
having to confront the full impact of their inadequacy. There are
ringing declarations about the benefits of frustration and the need for
grit.
These themes are sounded with numbing regularity, yet those who
sound them often adopt a self-congratulatory tone, as if it took
extraordinary gumption to say pretty much what everyone else is
saying. Indeed, this fundamentally conservative stance on children and
parenting has become common even for people who are liberal on other
issues.
But seriously, has any child who received a trinket after losing a
contest walked away believing that he (or his team) won or that
achievement doesnt matter? Giving trophies to all the kids is a well-
meaning and mostly innocuous attempt to appreciate everyones effort.
Even so, Im not really making a case for doing so, since it distracts
us from rethinking competition itself and the belief that people can
succeed only if others fail.
Rather, my intent is to probe the underlying cluster of mostly
undefended beliefs about what life is like (awful), what teaches
resilience (experiences with failure), what motivates people to excel
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(rewards) and what produces excellence (competition).
Most of all, its assumed that the best way to get children ready for
the miserable real world that awaits them is to make sure they have
plenty of miserable experiences while theyre young. Conversely, if
theyre spared any unhappiness, theyll be ill-prepared.
This is precisely the logic employed not so long ago to frame
bullying as a rite of passage that kids were expected to deal with on
their own, without assistance from overprotective adults.
In any case, no one ever explains the mechanism by which the
silence of a long drive home without a trophy is supposed to teach
resilience. Nor are we told whether theres any support for this theory of
inoculation by immersion. Have social scientists shown that those who
are spared, say, the rigors of dodge ball (which turns children into
human targets) or class rank (which pits students against one another)
will wind up unprepared for adulthood?
Not that I can find. In fact, studies of those who attended the sort
of nontraditional schools that afford an unusual amount of autonomy
and nurturing suggest that the great majority seemed capable of
navigating the transition to traditional colleges and workplaces.
But when you point out the absence of logic or evidence, it soon
becomes clear that trophy rage is less about prediction what will
happen to kids later than ideology: how they ought to be treated
now. Fury over the possibility that kids will get off too easy or feel too
good about themselves seems to rest on three underlying values.
The first is deprivation: Kids shouldnt be spared struggle and
sacrifice, regardless of the effects. The second value is scarcity: the
belief that excellence, by definition, is something that not everyone can
attain. No matter how well a group of students performs, only a few
should get As. Otherwise were sanctioning grade inflation and
mediocrity. To have high standards, there must always be losers.
But its the third conviction that really ties everything together: an
endorsement of conditionality. Children ought never to receive
something desirable a sum of money, a trophy, a commendation
unless theyve done enough to merit it. They shouldnt even be allowed
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to feel good about themselves without being able to point to tangible
accomplishments. In this view, we have a moral obligation to reward
the deserving and, equally important, make sure the undeserving go
conspicuously unrewarded. Hence the anger over participation
trophies. The losers mustnt receive something that even looks like a
reward.
A commitment to conditionality lives at the intersection of
economics and theology. Its where lectures about the law of the
marketplace meet sermons about what we must do to earn our way into
heaven. Here, almost every human interaction, even among family
members, is regarded as a kind of transaction.
Interestingly, no research that I know of has ever shown that
unconditionality is harmful in terms of future achievement,
psychological health or anything else. In fact, studies generally show
exactly the opposite. One of the most destructive ways to raise a child is
with conditional regard.
Over the last decade or so, two Israeli researchers, Avi Assor and
Guy Roth, and their colleagues in the United States and Belgium, have
conducted a series of experiments whose consistent finding is that when
children feel their parents affection varies depending on the extent to
which they are well behaved, self-controlled or impressive at school or
sports, this promotes the development of a fragile, contingent and
unstable sense of self.
Other researchers, meanwhile, have shown that high self-esteem is
beneficial, but that even more desirable is unconditional self-esteem: a
solid core of belief in yourself, an abiding sense that youre competent
and worthwhile even when you screw up or fall short. In other words,
the very unconditionality that seems to fuel attacks on participation
trophies and the whole self-esteem movement turns out to be a
defining feature of psychological health. Its precisely what we should
be helping our children to acquire.
The author of The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About
Children and Parenting, from which this article was adapted.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on May 4, 2014, on page SR9 of the New York edition
with the headline: Do Our Kids Get Off Too Easy?.