Why is a medal for everyone not a good idea?
When everyone wins, nobody wins.
The other day my four children were running in the front yard. “Ready?” my son, age 10, yelled. “Go!” They all ran as fast as they could to the swing and jumped on. The 12 and 10 year old ran the fastest and jumped right on the swing. The 7 year old ran a little slower and waited for the swing to come back and then jumped on. The 4 year old ran fast, but even so, was the last one on the swing.
The 4 year old came to me pouting a moment later and said he had to wait to get on the swing and he was sad he wasn’t as fast. I explained to him that his legs are shorter than the other kids, but that he will keep growing taller and taller.
We can’t expect that all kids will be on an equal playing field; this will be detrimental to them as they begin college and working, as they learn that sometimes, there are people who are smarter, stronger, and faster than you.
If I had interrupted their play and said to them, ‘Run as fast as you can to the swing, but don’t get on until everyone is there’ would not have been as fun. It is exhilarating to run fast and feel the pleasure of being first.
My son mentioned earlier was told by the physical education coach at his school that everyone in his class needed to run 4 laps around the playground. He said he was one of the first kids done, and when he sat down, the coach told him to keep running laps until everyone had finished their 4 laps. My son felt frustrated. He told me later that he likes running fast, he likes passing kids, and he loves the burst of speed he gets at the end when he is almost to the finish line. After finishing his 5th lap, he started walking, slower and slower, dragging his feet. He said he felt like he was being punished because he couldn’t stop until everyone was done with their laps. At the end, almost the whole class was glaring at two kids who were holding up the entire class as they slowly strolled the playground, making everyone else do extra laps.
This is the problem of making everyone a winner, no one really wins.
The winner should be the best, the first. They should not be on an equal level as the slowest, or the nonathletic. If the coach had perhaps instead said something along the lines of ‘Once you finish your 4 laps you may play on the swings, slide, and monkey bars’ then the kids who try hard are rewarded. The kids who don’t put any effort into the activity, are not. Perhaps it would inspire the slow kids to jog instead of walk. Maybe they would learn that doing something quickly they don’t like, goes by faster than doing it slowly.
Author Joanna Popcock1 said, “Studies show that feedback is a necessary component in the building of a child’s sense of self-worth. But, interestingly, students do not seem to need praise in order to thrive.” If the coach had said the children who finished their 4 laps, “You ran your 4 laps at ___ time. See if next week you can shave some time off.” That would have been feedback. Instead, he tried to praise all the children by having them finish their laps at the same time, so they all began and ended together. This did not encourage or unify the children, but rather created discord among them.
1 Popcock, Joanna (2017). Are We Spoiling Our Kids with Too Much Praise? J Astor Daily. https://daily.jstor.org/are-we-spoiling-our-kids-with-too-much-praise/
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