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I agree with this assessment. People who are vitriolically opposed to 'participation trophies' miss something very basic in my opinion, and that is, participation is optional. Meaning, you have to show up to get the trophy.

This is a subtle distinction I didn't get until raising my own kids. Maybe this is obvious to others, but it was a real "aha" moment to me. To get your kids to act the way you want, you can't just focus on the negative all the time, you have to let them know when they're doing things right. If you just wait for them to screw up then yell at them, you end up doing a lot of yelling, and they're behavior sucks. But when they're sitting at the table eating their dinner, using their fork like they're supposed to, a comment that hey, you're doing a great job right now! really goes a long way in communicating what your expectations are of them.

Before I had kids, if I'd heard this, I would think those parents are pandering and dumb. But it really does work.

Then don't lie about what you're praising, make it clear and focused on the actual positive.

If you're going to have a ribbon or something, make sure that it's for seeing the task through, for "being there". Not something to try to artificially rival or nearly match 'being the best'.

Like most recreational sports like triathlon and marathon have finishing medals. It feels ok when you get it, but clearly people getting these don't think they are winning anything.

The thing that makes that one praise at the table meaningful at all is the fact that there had been dozens of times the kids behaved just as well, or mostly as well, but the parents choose to not make a big deal about it.

The same argument works for negative reinforcement as well. The most convincing argument I have heard about avoiding harsh rising of children has nothing to do with the intrinsic rights o kids. Instead, it points out that one day, not that far away, you may find your teenager consuming drugs, or engaged in unprotected sexual intercourse, or commiting petty crime; and if by then you have not left yourself enough room to escalate short of corporal punishment (or not even that) then you might find yourself in a fight that you cannot win a hormone loaded young person that never learned to respect you and surely won't start today.

So, I think this has a lot to do with signal to noise ratio. Whether you praise or you demean, the point is to make it rare enough to be noticed when it happens. I did not always do it that way, but I have got better results when I began following that advice.

I think this applies to all levels of life and career. As a millennial working for a boss that knows only the stick and never ever picks the carrot, I wish you could give him some advice. I can do everything right for 6-12 months and never hear from him...then make one mistake and here comes HR with threats of termination.

the kids were never fooled. They knew exactly who had really won

Yep, all that positive reinforcement only taught us not to trust praise. At least, that was my response. Praise just reinforced how I already felt about myself. If I felt I was doing well, praise felt like confirmation, and it felt great. If I didn't feel I had done something to deserve it, praise felt awful, like I had been called out as being especially pathetic.

My knee-jerk reaction to an unexpected compliment is still to feel humiliated and angry. I've learned to think twice and sometimes realize, yeah, I did handle that well, or yeah, this is a nice outfit, but I still have that instant of feeling attacked before I control my reaction.

I think that's a lesson to learn: you can't erase the difference between success and failure. If you try, you just end up confusing them. A kid who hears praise every time he fucks up learns to associate praise with failure and learns there's no way to deal with failure except to pretend it didn't happen.

I am also uncomfortable with compliments. About the only praise I can stand now comes with a bonus check attached, because that confirms the [additional] value that person placed on my effort. Even if you're faking that enthusiasm, I still get to spend the money.

Otherwise, if you valued my performance at the cost of printing up a certificate on paper that is slightly heavier and more cream-colored than normal copy paper, and with an injection-molded bit of plastic that has an engraved plaque glued to it, I would feel about $25 worth of honored.

That crap works on my father, though. He likes everyone to know how great and interesting he is.

For me, nothing is worse than getting a compliment when I don't think I deserve one, and if I already think I deserve one, I don't actually need to get any, because I'm already feeling great.

I agree and furthermore I think that excessive praise even when someone is just doing what's expected of them can be harmful.

Anecdotal: My boss used to go around praising people in general for just doing their jobs. I was even on the receiving end of so many "have I told you how awesome you are" or "I hope you realize how valuable you are to the operation" canned responses that, although it was nice to hear, it lost its luster eventually. I ended up replying every time he'd do this with a motion of opening a beer can accompanied with a verbal "psshtt" sound and adding in a "thanks for the can of praise." It was meant in jest and he took it in stride and understood it wasn't meant with any malice. I was just poking a little fun at the observations he was making.

The point is, when you do it to too many people, too often, and for doing nothing but what's expected of them, it starts to ring hollow eventually.

Anecdotal: I observed something about myself which I found peculiar. A friend of a friend on Facebook, whom I observe to have quite intelligent DH4+ responses to comments even if the masses usually come back with a DH0 or DH1 response. I found myself observing his responses to other folks' comments and throwing in my own $.02. I discovered that the quality of my responses was greatly elevated when replying to him, clearly attempting to engage him at his level. This was sometimes rewarded with a 'like' from him, and sometimes not. When receiving a 'like' it resulted in a physiological response from me akin to a very light drug high.

What does DH stand for?

Apparently "disagreement hierarchy".

Took me quite some time to find the magic combination of search terms. Of course HN assumes intimate knowledge with PG's works. ;)

http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

My apologies. Yes, that's the correct reference. I learned about Paul Graham via several HN posts years ago and his explanation isn't unnecessarily complicated so I figured his work was widely known/understood.

P.S. when I put "dh0 response" into Google, the first link is Paul Graham's How to Disagree

Your Google-fu is better than mine. I tried "DH0", then "DH0 DH1", "dh disagreement", "dh levels", and it wasn't until "dh0 dh1 levels" that I got my answer. :)

Source: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

I think trophies for trying shows that the self-esteem movement didn't go far enough.

Take a company with a completely and utterly broken sales process. Landing page copy is abjectly horrible, half the orders get dropped, no tracking or analytics, and one hand doesn't know what the other one is doing. Now fixing that entire system is a hard job, but a valuable one. So what do we do? We give people coupons. That's easy.

Now take the "self-esteem movement". The basic idea was that it'd be valuable to give people a sense of trust in their own abilities, acknowledge them as intrinsically valuable, and have them learn to appreciate their own accomplishments, because that better prepares them for any of the challenges that life may offer. But to put that to work up and down the stack is a hard problem. So we hand out coupons. That's easy.

And in that we accomplish the opposite from what we set out to do. Instead of feeling acknowledged, children feel conned. Instead of making them feel valued for what they are, we make them feel interchangeable. Instead of helping children celebrate their achievement we undermine the concept of achievement in their minds by treating it as "eh, you've tried".

The devil does not deserve even the due you're giving it. Imposing a dysfunctional self-concept on children to satisfy the parents' anxiety is at best morally dubious in and of itself, but more importantly, praise that is relentlessly unconditional and unearned ignores everything researchers have found in operant conditioning concerning satiation, schedule, individualization, and zone of proximal development.

All of which are points I carefully take into consideration before saying "Good job!"

So many devils, so little time.

"Operant conditioning"?

For whom and for what purposes are our kids to be satiated, scheduled, individualized, and zoned?

That's your choice, as a parent. You're going to attempt to manipulate the child into certain behaviors whether you think of it in scientific terms or not. Might as well do it effectively.

> Imposing a dysfunctional self-concept on children to satisfy the parents' anxiety is at best morally dubious in and of itself

When I played rec sports as a kid, we weren't allowed to keep score because it might lead to bad feelings and competitiveness. Not just when we were too young to do it right, but up to around age 15. Everyone involved did keep score of course, we'd all signed up for a competitive sport outside of school. (Or been pushed in by parents, who nevertheless didn't want scorekeeping...) But anyone overheard mentioning the score got an angry lecture, so we had to do it when there were no (adult) witnesses.

It didn't take long at all for kids to notice that we were 'protecting' the adults instead of the reverse. Score was still kept, kids were still being bullied to tears over losses, nothing had changed, but the rule worked perfectly at making sure parents and coaches didn't see it happen.

I don't think participation ribbons hurt kids, because they have so little impact. At worst, aimless positivity is just a wasted opportunity for something better. But the more controlling side of self-esteem building is creepy and terrible - it has a horrible emphasis on changing kid's lives to allay their parents fears, no matter how unreasonable.

Sure: using a participation trophy to teach what success feels like (e.g. when you're 3 years old in a gymnastics performance for the first time in front of an audience full of strange parents) has more defensible merits. Using it as an attempt to dispel unpleasant emotions and thereby assault or hamper development of well-adjusted task metacognition is something else entirely.

I'm simply not having children unless I have a reasonable plan for alternatives to age-segregated schooling. The entire system is deeply, fundamentally flawed, and definitively not in the best interest of the child.

I'd be fascinated to see another system that could work at scale. Nor has there been a historical system that was better AFAICT.

I do have a few friends who home-school, and that's great if a parent can dedicate a significant amount of time to that.

I do applaud your stance. The chance for me to even consider it is long gone. :)