Should Everyone Get A Trophy Essay

Your child has just lost his game, showing him that he must improve. But not long after, his coach gives him a trophy, sending him the terribly wrong message that he doesn’t need to improve. Alternatively, someone else’s kid has won, but the trophy that is presented to them has little to no value due to the fact that everyone who’s lost has gotten a trophy anyway. This is the case nowadays as most kids sports programs waste around 12% of their budget on removing everyone’s motivation to improve, and the satisfaction of earning a trophy. The idea of giving every kid a trophy when they’ve done little to earn it is that it tells them that they do not need improvement, but isn’t improvement something that we need to encourage? Ashley Merryman briefly talks about this idea in her article, Losing Is Good for You, it states, “If children know they will automatically get an award, what is the impetus for improvement? Why bother learning problem-solving skills, when there are never obstacles to begin with?” This explains how irrational it is to give every kid trophies for mere participation, and even losing! Merryman also adds, “Awards can be powerful

Most of them like to point out that it makes kids happy, as stated in the article Should Everyone Get a Trophy by Lauren Tarshis, “He says that getting trophies has made him feel good about being on his teams.” That was said by a boy named Lucas, who was talking about how he gets trophies extremely effortlessly. So yes, it is true that trophies make some kids happy for a while, but that would only be looking at the short-term effects of getting unearned trophies. The long-term effects include lack of determination to improve, upsetting the kids that put actual effort into earning the trophies, and the tremendously large cost of the trophies themselves. So after all, the short-term effects aren’t really worth the long-term