I've never heard anyone say "the school gave my kid a 14th place ribbon, how cute!". It's always "can you believe they give out ribbons for 14th place now?!"

Kids are pretty astute at picking up on this stuff, and I expect that being given a 14th place ribbon just feels a little sad and pathetic to a kid.

It probably doesn't do any real harm either, apart from contributing to landfill waste!

There was a "protect kids self-esteem" bit, but that was entirely at the top end - there was no trophy saying "First Place". I certainly never saw trophies 'celebrating' losses.

More broadly, though, I definitely remember ignoring all of this stuff as a kid. We weren't allowed to keep score during soccer games because it "wasn't about winners and losers". (One wonders why we were playing a competitive sport, then.) Not just "score wasn't kept" but "get in trouble if you're heard talking about score".

So... we had to keep score when coaches and refs weren't in earshot. That was the entirety of the result. If anything, it sort of felt like something we did to protect the fragile adults! After all, the winners still made fun of the losers every game, nothing had changed, but now the adults didn't have to see it happen.

"We don't keep score, there's no winners and losers, but if we win this game we make the postseason."

I agree that this has been blown out of proportion, as csydas said in the parent comment. Criticising participation trophies is mostly a way for certain people to signal that they don't buy in to "all that millennial snowflake bullshit". How much harm can it really do?

Having said all that, having to play soccer while secretly keeping score does sound crazy!

Kids are pretty smart (way smarter than some people/parents think they are) and they know how far they can go, and what they can get away with.

A participation ribbon might well have motivated me at age 6, and frankly I doubt both the morality and common sense of anyone saying a six year old is too happy at a swim class. Keeping kids involved at that age seems like the biggest goal.

On the other hand, I have annoyed memories of getting participation ribbons at 15 for doing terribly in races. They felt downright insulting, because I knew exactly how I'd done and I was basically getting a ribbon for taking a bus to the meet.

A shocking number of educational issues seem to boil down to "6 year olds are not 15 year olds". That, and "offering things is better than enforcing them" - participation ribbons are way better than banning score-keeping, which I also got to see.

I think the natural bias to put discrete values on things existing on a spectrum is where is all stems from. "We want to keep things simple, so here's this recipe for self-esteem" as opposed to "here's an age-based breakdown of ways to build self-esteem". Even then, the "enlightened" example is missing loads of other conditions, like if the person suffered emotional abuse or has automatic negative thoughts.

Also, banning score-keeping is the naive approach. I think an interesting one would be to add a game score & encourage both teams to collaborate to increase it. I don't know how it'd effect things, but it'd be fun to find out!

I time the runs myself on my phone so the email has little real purpose, but for some reason it's very satisfying to know that my efforts have been logged in a database.

I'm unlikely to ever hit the top 20, so this is very much a participation trophy. Maybe they can be motivating after all?

(Take with a grain of salt. My only experiences with raising children involve raising myself & my parents over the past 1.5 years.)

See for example the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanterne_rouge .

Parents will subvert the will of the coaches wanting their kid to shine rather than as part of a team.

Parents and grandparents will continually scream to their children what to do or abuse at the referee.

One of my college roommates parents was a Professor at MIT, and even though he got into an engienering school ranked right under it, his parents treated him liek the failure of the family and despite him being capable of great things, he had already been labeled as the failure in his family for ONLY having a 3.8GPA at the number 3 school in the world and mine as well work at McDonalds if he was going to destroy the family tradition of going to MIT, producing 45 patents, getting a PhD and writing 3 textbooks before the age of 30.

The kid was capable and accomplished an amazing amount but he really viewed himself as quite worthless and had a hard time getting a job after college due to his crushing lack of self esteem.

This is the opposite extreme but so is getting 35 trophies for a 5th grade soccer team.

I think both are extremes and the conversation needs to be recentered around the idea of grade inflation and positive self regard.

Again, you can have positive self regard for kids and NOT give them a trophy just for showing up to school. Theres a large medium here.

The biggest benefit of consistent positive self regard (which can exist without trophies and claps for every minor positive step in life) is the ability to prevent downward spirals where kids beat themselves up and begin to internalize the negative feedback and continually snowball their lack of self esteem to where they really handicap their ability to grow, as illustrated by my friend in the example above.

if a child is labeled as bottom 30% of the class or the team in middle school, negative feedback is more likely to keep him locked in the negative self image he has, instead of the belief by teachers that he/she has the ability to improve.

Regardless of if the kid will ever be the top 10% or is naturally more talented than the top 10%, thats NOT the point of continual positive self regard. The point is to continue trying and learning and self improvement. Labeling kdis in boxes really does limit their ability to grow and change their status and lets be honest, teachers are NOT always the best/the most right about knowing who is more intelligent and smarter, and these things can change alot from middle school to highschool.

You don't have to give the bottom 30% of the kids the same grades or trophies, but you can treat them with positive regard, and by doing that remind them they are human and that you believe in their ability to grow.

Nothing sucks worse than a teacher immediately writing off a kid as locked in a certain status range. They might actually begin to believe it, and if you don't beleive individuals have the ability to grow and learn beyond their initial casting/grade heirarchy then you really shouldn't be teaching and furthermore, I find these justifications by teachers more of an excuse for the fact that the U.S. is bottom ranked globally right now as a first world country for education. Youre a TEACHER. you job is to enable learning not say its just the way it is that the Straight A kids will always be the straight A kids and vise versa and really you have no control over it. If you feel that way, then please go find another job.

I would say negative feedback is far more damaging, and furthermore, the lack of negative feedback does not require trophies and delusional inflations of self worth that apparently according to the author also equal caccooning children from the consequences of life at every step. This is just false.

The Debugging Mindset - http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3068754