Do We All Deserve Gold? Setting Kids Up To Fail By Vivian Diller

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Recently, the topic of participation trophies and direct achievement has been debated among parents, schools, and coaches as it seems that within every event, children are awarded with some form of acknowledgement. Plaques, certificates, medals, and trophies are thrown at kids left and right; but, do they have a significance in a child’s overall ability to discern achievement from failure? Or do these seemingly meaningless trinkets have more worth in memory and core values like perseverance and commitment? In the 2011 essay “Do We All Deserve Gold? Setting Kids Up To Fail”, Vivian Diller, PhD, writes that “awards can intensify competition, impact self-esteem, get parents too involved and add tension among coaches, but they also teach kids about winning and …show more content…

In juxtaposition, Diller’s definition of “achievement” is to be the best within a group of people and outdoing them rather than just outdoing a personal best. This division of thought is apparent through the author’s individual anecdotes and how different their life experiences are. At one point, Diller was a competitive ballet performer, constantly fighting for a spot on stage and learning from an early age that your best sometimes isn’t enough to get where you’d like to be. Diller remarks that this gave her “a fierce determination to do [her] best at whatever [she] chose to do.” Contrastingly, Heffernan refers to her son’s younger self and how even as an adult, he keeps his participation trophies “as a fond memory of a team that showed up, played hard and- if [she] recall[s] right- lost every

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