However Donald Trump turns out as president, his administration, unlike Barack Obama’s, won’t reflect the “everyone gets a trophy” syndrome that even some millennials are beginning to question.
Trump, at age 70, is from a generation that grew up with winners and losers on the playgrounds, and he is surrounding himself with a cabinet of the same ilk.
This isn’t to suggest that Barack Obama isn’t competitive or that he necessarily subscribes to the idea that everyone is entitled to an award for simply participating. As the first African-American president and the fifth-youngest president when he took office at age 47 eight years ago, Obama is clearly competitive and a winner.
But many in his generation ascribe to the theory that kids need to feel good about themselves even when they are outperformed by their peers.
They do need self-esteem when they do the best they can, but everyone being a winner just isn’t the way life is. Some athletes are more gifted than others. Some students are more intelligent than their peers. Some simply try harder.
The goal should be to do the best one can with what he or she is given, and for that there should be recognition.
But not keeping score and giving everyone the same reward, regardless of talent or effort, doesn’t equip young people for the inevitable defeats everyone experiences sometimes in life.
Following his team’s loss to Maryland last month, Louisville women’s basketball coach Jeff Walz turned his postgame press conference into what some called a rant on the subject. In his view, too many millennials are “soft,” thanks to America’s increasingly prevalent “everyone’s a winner” attitude toward competition among kids.
“Right now,” he said, “the generation of kids that are coming through, everybody gets a damn trophy, OK? You finish last, you come home with a trophy. You kidding me? What’s that teaching kids? It’s OK to lose! And unfortunately, it’s our society. It’s what we’re building for. And it’s not just in basketball, it’s in life. Everybody thinks they should get a job. Everybody thinks they should get a good job. No, that’s not the way it works. But unfortunately, that’s what we are preparing for. Because you finish fifth, you walk home with this nice trophy, parents are all excited? No. I mean, not to be too blunt, but you’re a loser. Like, we’re losers, we got beat. So you lost. There is no trophy for us.”
Not to be overlooked is that the team that defeated Louisville consisted of players approximately the same age as those who lost. So everyone that age wasn’t a loser in that particular game.
Also, responding to a loss often tells more about an individual’s or a team’s character than a win.
