do our kids get off too easy_ - nytimes

8/12/2019 Do Our Kids Get Off Too Easy_ - NYTimes

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

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/opinion/sunday/do-our-kids-get-off-too-easy.html?_r=0 2/4

(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: thebelief 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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5 5 2014 Do Our Kids Get Off Too Easy? - NYTimes.com

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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 whenchildren 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 competentand 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?.
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/msc.htm

do our kids get off too easy_ - nytimes

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