I recently watched a TV program Real Sports where the presenter looked into the culture of handing out participation（参与）trophies to children. There's no doubt that today's kids live in a world of scoreless games and everyone gets a trophy. Sometimes when a league decides to award（奖励）just the winners instead of all participants, the parents buy their own trophies for the whole team!
However, when we try to protect children from losing at the early ages, are they less prepared when real competition kicks in? People who support giving trophies say they want to make each child feel special, but how does this make them feel special? Stanford University looked at this recently and found that although kids react positively to praise-they enjoy hearing that they're talented, smart and so on, they break down at the first experience of difficulty. Discouraged by their failure, they say they'd rather cheat than risk failing again.
There are also endless social-science studies showing the harmful effects of easy competition, not just on the psyche（精神）but more surprisingly on achievement. If children know they will get an award simply by showing up, what is the reason for improvement? Jean Twenge, writer of Generation Me, warns that when living rooms are filled with participation trophies, it's part of a larger cultural message: to succeed, you just have to show up. In college, those who've grown up receiving these endless awards do the required work, but don't see the need to do it well. In the office, they still believe that attendance is all it takes to get a promotion（晋升）.
When I was a child, I earned my fair share of trophies but none of them was for just showing up. I also missed out on even more and had to watch my friends collect them while I stood by and clapped. I realized that in life, I'm going to lose more often than I win, even if I'm good at something, and I've got to get used to that to keep going.
When children make mistakes, our job should not be to turn those losses into decorated（装饰性的）victories. Instead, our job is to help kids overcome difficulties, to help them see that progress over time is more important than a certain win or loss, and to help them politely congratulate those who succeed when they fail. To do that, we need to refuse all the meaningless trophies.
