Participation Trophy Syndrome (PTS) is the name given to millenials' behavior, which is believed to be caused by the overpraising of children beginning at a very young age. Today's youth are given trophies and praise for just abut anything they can be given praise for. Beginning around age three, children begin to play sports where they will receive a trophy for every season, no matter the skill or success of their team. The same is true in schools where students are given constant positive feedback on everything they do. This overpraising continues throughout grade school and in some cases in higher education as well. Participation trophies were created to boost children's self esteem and make them feel better about themselves. Many years later, some parts of the country have decided to stop giving participation trophies to every child whose name is on the roster because of the supposed effects of PTS. There are generally three arguments with regards to how children should be given trophies. One side does not want trophies whatsoever. They believe they are not beneficial in any way and they cause lasting damage to kids. The other extreme wants children to receive participation trophies for everything they do forever. They believe the trophies boost self esteem and have no real side effects. The third argument is that children should be given trophies until middle school and then only the winners should be rewarded. They believe the trophies are a good way to get children into sports without having to force them, but they are also aware of the possible lasting effects of the constant praise that children in today's politically correct society receive. I believe that participation trophies and large amounts of positive feedback in schools are beneficial up to age 10 because they are a good way to get young children into sports and to give student an interest in school but after age 10 overpraise will begin to cause long term effects on children that will carry with them into their adult life. 

Beginning at a young age children learn to be competitive in a variety of activities including at school and sports. With the activities comes praise. Children love to be praised and they know that they will be praised for high scores on a test. Children who are constantly overpraised for their efforts begin to seek only praise in school and lose interest in actually learning material in the classroom. A study by Mueller and Dweck found that "children praised for intelligence cared so much about their performance and how it reflected on them that they lied about their performance" (Mueller and Dweck, 43). This is a serious issue created by overpraising. Children worked only for the perceived reward and were willing to compromise their morality to get it. This becomes an even larger problem as they grow up and are willing to lie to a boss about their performance to gain praise. Instead of having learning goals the students have begin to do things just because they think they will be rewarded. This is when praise becomes a problem. Children who are not able to cheat or lie about their performance have been taught to care so much about the praise that when they do not perform well they are devastated. 

The children who are overpraised have been conditioned to always be a winner regardless of their performance. This is especially concerning because as the children age they will inevitably fail at some point and "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" (Merryman, np). "[Children] 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" (Merryman, np). The praise sets an expectation of success and when it eventually is not reached the students are demoralized and the students who do succeed expect to be always praised. This is fine while in elementary school but then when the children become young adults and are not given constant feedback, they break down. 

So what is the age when the trophies go from motivating to destructive? The age when students and athletes begin to face actual difficulties in their lives. This is usually about 5th grade when math and science get hard and when sports begin to have tryouts. "Praise can instill a sense of contingent self-worth that leads to helplessness in the face of subsequent difficulties" (Henderson and Lepper, np). So while the children do not face difficult obstacles in their learning the praise is not harming them too severely. But as soon as they are, the praise has to stop or as these studies have proven, the children experience mental issues. 

The group that wants the trophies to be given out argues that the rewards teach the right values to kids and that they are for fun and don't have any negative long term effects. They argue that the trophies make the kids feel good and that they earn them, saying things like "these kids need to be rewarded for finishing the season and not giving up on their team. These kids earn these trophies even if they don't win a single game" (Pawlowski, np). What this is saying is that the kids deserve an award for no success whatsoever. But that's not how the world actually works. Trophies are for winners and if they get trophies without winning they believe that they are entitled to a reward regardless of their achievements. One of the biggest symptoms of PTS is entitlement and children who are unjustly praised gain a sense of entitlement to the rest of their lives outside the sport. In a business setting a worker who has been given unjust praise their whole life feels entitled to a promotion without any performance. One trophy supporter said that "My children looks forward to their trophy as much as playing the game" (Merryman, np). This is exactly the problem. It sends the message of entitlement and that to succeed you just have to show up. Hard work earns awards; children should not be praised for just showing up. 

The trophy supporters also argue that the trophies are just for fun and don't carry and meaning. They argue that the trophies have become politicized to mean something that they don't. "I can't figure out what is so distasteful about a child getting a "good job" medal ...  My 4-year-old is starting soccer in the fall. Now, I don't care how good he is at the sport. Win or lose, that kid's coming home with a trophy" (Zadrosny, np). This argument expands to a much larger accusation that "the more adults win at life, the more likely they are to want to keep the spoils of victory out of the hands of losers. The desire to withhold participation trophies increased with income, age, and education" and "the further right respondents leaned, the less they were keen on prizes solely for participation. Progressives and liberals were most ready to hand them out" (Zadrosny, np). This may be true, but that doesn't mean that the trophies don't have an underlying affect on the children. "The more we teach our children to rely on external motivation from objects like trophies, the greater risk we run of undermining the very values we hope to instill" (Zadrosny, np). The question is not if the trophies make kids feel good, of course they do. The issue is that although the awards are good in the present, in the future the lasting effects and feelings of entitlement that the kids subconsciously picked up will be exposed. Lisa Heffernan says "participation trophies teach a worthwhile lesson: "There is something to teaching kids that it is worth keeping a commitment, that we value this. Winning and losing is not a lesson that kids need to search out to find. It's everywhere. But they also need to learn how important it is that everyone shows up" (np). This is a legitimate concern but at what point do they learn that value. After how many years of receiving the trophies have they learned the value of showing up. Surely it is not past age 12. The trophy supporters argue that the awards prevent depression in children because it makes them feel good about themselves. In a debate on Fox News, David Webb said "there is a winner and there is a loser. That's the rules of the game. You win by being exceptional. The reason kids feel depressed is because they are so protected all the time so when something bad happens they have no resiliency and that is leaving them very vulnerable" (Patriots in The News). 

Losing is good for you. "Today's 20-somethings are struggling in the cold world after enjoying childhoods filled with warmth and support. Our parents tried to see how much self-confidence they could pack into us, outside of collecting dust and decorating childhood rooms, have these plaques and trophies served any real purpose?" (Diller, np). Yes, they have served some purpose. The trophies were originally created to raise the self-esteem and they did succeed in doing that. "It's now so dramatically high that social scientists are considering whether they need to find a different measurement system -- we've broken the scale" (Diller, np). Children are now so full of themselves that they have almost no resilience after failure. Acknowledging children's every day achievements, she says, will likely have negative repercussions on their motivation to work toward them. She says "In some schools they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to anything in real life." This is spot on. Failing builds character and everyone has heard some form of a saying about a famous inventor who failed 1000 times before succeeding. So why is it not alright to allow our youth to fail when clearly it does provide some benefit that far outweighs any negative effects. Diller raised the thought that by not allowing our kids to fail we might actually be setting them up for more catastrophic failure in the future. She says "I wanted to give my children all they wanted, all I hadn't had. In doing so I may have deprived them of what they needed most: the grit and the tools, to take on the world and make their own way." What she means by this is that when people fail they learn one way to not do something. Fail enough times and they will find one way to do something. Allowing failure and embracing it is a vital element of learning in any aspect of life. 

Aside from the teenaged entitlement and motivation issues we can examine the question of where participation trophies worth the effects on children's futures. To do this we must understand what the lasting effects actually are.  According to Ron Alsop the "trophy generation" are millenials and it is they who are infected with PTS. He claims that the millenials have the most unrealistic expectations of how they will be treated when they enter the workforce of any past generation ever. He says "millenials will learn that they will probably have to adjust their expectations if they hope to make the most of their talents and realize their personal and professional dreams" (np). The expectations he is referring to are the ones they have been given all throughout their lives. They expect to be constantly given positive feedback on their work because when they were in school that's what they were given. They expect that they will be rewarded the same as the other members on the team regardless of individual performance because throughout their childhood they were taught that everyone is a winner, even the losers. They expect that they will be given every accommodation they ask for because they have been given those accommodations for the last 20 years. These trophy kids will not seamlessly integrate into existing workplaces. Alsop says "this generation of young people is quite serious about reshaping the work environment to conform to their personal goals and lives" (np) and "employers face some of their biggest management challenges ever as they try to integrate millions of millenials into a workplace with three other very different generations' (np). The last few generations have been historically unentitled and hardworking and may not take to kindly to the opposite behaviors from the millenials. The difference between them may very well be the lasting effects of the constant praise they were given as kids. 

Managing the millennials once they do enter the workforce will be a daunting task. They have not been well prepared for failure so "it may require more finesse in preparing them for receiving negative feedback, which of course is a necessary part of a leader's job that is critical to improving individual and organizational performance" (Crampton and Hodge, 4). Clearly the millenials are experiencing long term effects of PTS because managers and employers have openly voiced the difficulties in trying to integrate them into existing workplaces. Millenials are "obsessed with career development and promotions based on skills, rather than seniority" (Crampton and Hodge, 4). They feel entitled to things that previous generations have not due to the overwhelming amount of praise and reassurance they have been given during their childhood. 

The evidence is stacked high with proof of the lasting effects of overpraise and participation trophies of children. The negative effects of PTS far outweigh any momentary happiness that older children receive from being awarded the trophies. Once children are teenagers they generally only care about the championship trophies and the ones they know they worked really hard to earn; the rest, the participation trophies, will forever lie in a cardboard box in the attic. As kids, they don't know the trophies are going to negatively affect them for life and if they did the kids wouldn't want them anyway. The trophies make young children momentarily happy and that should be the extent of their use.  Awards do good in getting children interested in sports and activities that they would otherwise not have a desire to be exposed to but they begin to have awful effects when given to kids who have left the elementary era of their lives. The trophies serve no purpose after kids begin to fail because they do realize that they are being patronized. Children don't begin to actively face challenges in school and sports until age 10 and it is at that age that participation trophies and overpraising needs to end because it begins to create behavior that will cause an array of problems with them later in life.

