Asia-Pacific Coaching Alliance
  • Join
    • Refer A Friend
  • Educate
    • Coach For Impact! Newsletter
    • Ask The Coach (APCA)
    • Coaching Clinic (APCA)
    • Coach Training & Certification
    • Expert Interview Series >
      • Are You An Expert?
      • Prepare For Your Interview
    • Content Archives
    • Resources >
      • APCA Audio Guides
  • Connect
  • Protect
    • APCA Ethics
  • Find Coach
  • Blog
  • Advertise
  • About
    • Leadership & Advisory Board
    • Our Sponsors
    • Contributors & Volunteers
    • Membership Rules
    • Code Of Conduct
    • Terms Of Service
    • Privacy Policy

HIGH-IMPACT 
COACHING FOR ASIA

What Can Losing Teach Us And Our Clients?

10/11/2013

0 Comments

 
A very thought-provoking article on the value of competition, winning, losing and "participation" trophies.

- APCA Editor


New York Times Op-Ed Contributor
Losing Is Good for You

By Ashely Merryman
Published: September 24, 2013

LOS ANGELES — AS children return to school this fall and sign up for a new year’s worth of extracurricular activities, parents should keep one question in mind. Whether your kid loves Little League or gymnastics, ask the program organizers this: “Which kids get awards?” If the answer is, “Everybody gets a trophy,” find another program.

Trophies were once rare things — sterling silver loving cups bought from jewelry stores for truly special occasions. But in the 1960s, they began to be mass-produced, marketed in catalogs to teachers and coaches, and sold in sporting-goods stores.

Today, participation trophies and prizes are almost a given, as children are constantly assured that they are winners. One Maryland summer program gives awards every day — and the “day” is one hour long. In Southern California, a regional branch of the American Youth Soccer Organization hands out roughly 3,500 awards each season — each player gets one, while around a third get two. Nationally, A.Y.S.O. local branches typically spend as much as 12 percent of their yearly budgets on trophies.

It adds up: trophy and award sales are now an estimated $3 billion-a-year industry in the United States and Canada.

Po Bronson and I have spent years reporting on the effects of praise and rewards on kids. The science is clear. Awards can be powerful motivators, but nonstop recognition does not inspire children to succeed. Instead, it can cause them to underachieve.

Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University, found that kids respond positively to praise; they enjoy hearing that they’re talented, smart and so on. But after such praise of their innate abilities, they collapse at the first experience of difficulty. Demoralized by their failure, they say they’d rather cheat than risk failing again.

In recent eye-tracking experiments by the researchers Bradley Morris and Shannon Zentall, kids were asked to draw pictures. Those who heard praise suggesting they had an innate talent were then twice as fixated on mistakes they’d made in their pictures.

By age 4 or 5, children aren’t fooled by all the trophies. They are surprisingly accurate in identifying who excels and who struggles. Those who are outperformed know it and give up, while those who do well feel cheated when they aren’t recognized for their accomplishments. They, too, may give up.

It turns out that, once kids have some proficiency in a task, the excitement and uncertainty of real competition may become the activity’s very appeal.

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?

If I were a baseball coach, I would announce at the first meeting that there would be only three awards: Best Overall, Most Improved and Best Sportsmanship. Then I’d hand the kids a list of things they’d have to do to earn one of those trophies. They would know from the get-go that excellence, improvement, character and persistence were valued.

It’s accepted that, before punishing children, we must consider their individual levels of cognitive and emotional development. Then we monitor them, changing our approach if there’s a negative outcome. However, when it comes to rewards, people argue that kids must be treated identically: everyone must always win. That is misguided. And there are negative outcomes. Not just for specific children, but for society as a whole.

In June, an Oklahoma Little League canceled participation trophies because of a budget shortfall. A furious parent complained to a local reporter, “My children look forward to their trophy as much as playing the game.” That’s exactly the problem, says Jean Twenge, author of “Generation Me.”

Having studied recent increases in narcissism and entitlement among college students, she 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 endless awards do the requisite 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.

In life, “you’re going to lose more often than you win, even if you’re good at something,” Ms. Twenge told me. “You’ve got to get used to that to keep going.”

When children make mistakes, our job should not be to spin those losses into decorated victories. Instead, our job is to help kids overcome setbacks, to help them see that progress over time is more important than a particular win or loss, and to help them graciously congratulate the child who succeeded when they failed. To do that, we need to refuse all the meaningless plastic and tin destined for landfills. We have to stop letting the Trophy-Industrial Complex run our children’s lives.

This school year, let’s fight for a kid’s right to lose.

Ashley Merryman is the author, with Po Bronson, of “NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children” and “Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing.”
Read: Losing Is Good For You >>
0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    About Us

    The Asia-Pacific Coaching Alliance (APCA) is the #1 Gateway for Asia-Pacific Coaching Opportunities and Knowledge™. 

    We are exclusively focused on serving the unique needs of the dynamic and fast-growing  Asia-Pacific market as an
    educational and professional networking 
    organization as well as an Asia-Pacific knowledge base.     At APCA we prepare coaches of all stripes to Coach For Impact!™ and work to develop localized solutions that best fit the unique markets of Asia.

    Archives

    January 2017
    October 2016
    August 2016
    February 2016
    November 2015
    October 2015
    August 2015
    April 2015
    February 2015
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013

    Categories

    All
    Advertisers
    Announcements
    Apca
    Asia
    Asia Pacific Coaching Alliance
    Asia-pacific Coaching Alliance
    Audio Guides
    Branding
    Business Development
    China
    Chinese
    Client Intake
    Coach For Impact
    Coaching
    Coaching 2.0
    Coaching Careers
    Coaching Certifications
    Coaching Materials
    Coaching Non-coaches
    Coaching Training
    Communication
    Competition
    Conferences
    Culture
    Entrepreneurs
    Events
    Expert Coaches
    Factory Automation
    Hica
    Hica Advisory Board
    Hica Certification
    Hica Training
    Hica Website
    High Impact Coaching
    High-impact Coaching
    Humor
    Interviews
    Japan
    Japan Startups
    Korea
    Korean Startups
    Leadership
    Limitations
    Linkedin
    Marketing And Advertising
    Mental Chains
    Newsletter
    No Box Thinking
    Online Marketing
    Personal Branding
    Presentations
    Promotions
    Psychology
    Robotics
    Robots
    Roukan.com
    Roukan.jp
    Sales
    Social Media
    Sponsors
    Startups
    Taiwan
    Talent Transition
    Work Culture
    Work Environment

    RSS Feed

Newsletter
Educate
Connect
Protect
Training
Blog
Coach For Impact!™ Newsletter
Ask The Coach (APCA)
Coaching Clinic (APCA)
Ethics
Content Archives
Resources
Join Us / Become An APCA Member
Our Sponsors
Content Contributors
Volunteers
Leadership & Advisory Board

Membership Rules
Code of Conduct
Terms of Service
Privacy Policy
About Us
Picture
© Copyright 2012-2025 The High-Impact Coaching Alliance. All Rights Reserved.
Picture
  • Join
    • Refer A Friend
  • Educate
    • Coach For Impact! Newsletter
    • Ask The Coach (APCA)
    • Coaching Clinic (APCA)
    • Coach Training & Certification
    • Expert Interview Series >
      • Are You An Expert?
      • Prepare For Your Interview
    • Content Archives
    • Resources >
      • APCA Audio Guides
  • Connect
  • Protect
    • APCA Ethics
  • Find Coach
  • Blog
  • Advertise
  • About
    • Leadership & Advisory Board
    • Our Sponsors
    • Contributors & Volunteers
    • Membership Rules
    • Code Of Conduct
    • Terms Of Service
    • Privacy Policy