It’s time to stop being easy on kids.
Over the years kids sports has devolved from competition to just a game and school isn’t about knowledge just pushing kids through.
I recently saw a false story about Canadian Soccer taking the ball out of the game and while that wasn’t true it feels like that’s the direction we are taking.
Plenty of times players are given medals and trophies for losing. The problem with this is you’re rewarding kids when they don’t necessarily deserve it.
While I agree trying is the most important part of any sport or activity, if you reward a kid for just trying then they’re never going to aspire for anything bigger.
I played sports all through my childhood and the worst part of playing was when I lost. I hated losing, like anybody should.
The most important part of losing is learning how to deal with it. If you reward a kid for losing then he feels like a winner and he doesn’t experience how it feels to lose.
Another important part of losing is feeling the sting of losing and not wanting to feel it again. When you lose and it hurts, that’s a good thing, it makes you work harder and set higher goals so you don’t have to experience that feeling again.
The real world isn’t like that, all you are doing is setting up a kid to not know how to deal with loss or rejection.
School has taken the same path.
Instead of failing a student because they don’t know the curriculum or because they didn’t go to school, schools now take the approach that no one can fail.
Like in sports, this is a fundamentally flawed train of thought. If schools take the approach that kids can’t fail, then there is no reason to work hard to avoid failing. If there is no reason to work hard there is really no reason to learn.
A perfect example of this is a guy I worked with in Ontario. He is thirty years old and can’t read or write. He can’t read or write because he says he never went to school and the school, instead of holding him back and teaching him some of the most important day to day functions, just kept passing him and pushing him on to the next grade.
We should be teaching our children at a young age that hard work and dedication are extremely important traits, instead we are teaching them that they can’t lose or fail. It’s a shame because while teaching them they can’t fail we are actually setting them up to fail when they become an adult.
There’s a 20-year-old hockey player who is causing a lot of stink in the NHL right now because he isn’t happy that he’s not being played where and when he thinks he deserves.
He was recently sent to the minors to prove that he could play in the NHL and as a result announced that he had demanded a trade. Since then he hasn’t been brought back up to the NHL and has now refused to even play until he is traded.
A lot of people, myself included, would call this entitlement and quite truthfully he isn’t entitled to anything considering he’s a 20-something who has only played in the NHL for a year and a half.
He isn’t the only youngster that has entitlement issues. I hear all the time that my generation and the younger generations act like they deserve the world.
While I disagree that all kids my age and younger act like that, there are certainly some. In my opinion that boils down to our system today.
Why wouldn’t a kid feel entitled if he was never forced to work for anything because he couldn’t fail and he couldn’t lose?
