One thing that’s always bugged me is the label “trophy kid.”
“Trophy kid” is a slur used by older generations to demean millennials. The slur implies that because the millennial was handed unearned participation trophies and because he was mollycoddled by his parents (who protected his fragile self-esteem from ever being bruised by the harsh Darwinian world), the millennial enters the real world with a sense of entitlement, unrealistic expectations, and a bloated ego.
This label contrasts with the characters of the Baby Boomer generation. They’d have us believe that, in Caucasian America’s Golden Age, they grew up in a brutal Hunger Games-like era, where they chopped their own firewood, ran marathons to school, and benefited from a more callous dog-eat-dog world that formed them into hardened, upstanding, non-consumeristic individuals. An ideal upbringing, according to this line of thinking, might be gotten in Stalingrad in 1943, or from eating your shoe in the Great Depression.
While visiting my parent’s home, I started doing a little organizing of old stuff and came across a box of old test scores, report cards, and trophies.
I was a trophy kid. I was awarded a participation trophy after every baseball, hockey, and football season. But the trophies did nothing to make me feel exceptional. I always knew my place. Even the most mollycoddled first grader has some understanding of where he stands among his classmates. He knows who’s the smartest, the dumbest, the fastest, and the slowest. Here are a few test scores and report cards:
I always knew how smart I was in relation to the rest of the class. I always knew who the better athlete was. I didn’t just intuit these things: there were statistics that routinely and very clearly reminded me of my position in the pecking order. Sometimes I could tell where I ranked to the percentile.
I was constantly reminded of my averageness. This followed me throughout my whole childhood. While the advanced students were awarded honors and got to take AP classes, I did okay in second-tier classes among my fellow second-tier peers. From age six to eighteen, all of my sports teams were horrible. Virtually every season was a losing season, and my team was always among the worst in the league. I knew nothing but academic mediocrity and athletic failure. My peers beneath me certainly were aware of their lowly position and my peers above me were probably far from satisfied in the competitive school environment in which there’s always someone better. My point is that awards and trophies will never give a kid a bloated sense of self esteem in an ultra-competitive environment where he’s constantly reminded of his inferiority to someone else.
All this isn’t to make a statement about trophies. Kids always know who the true winners and losers are, and the trophies were as much junk to us then as they are now. Perhaps they were meaningful to the kids who were floundering as students and athletes, and, if that’s the case, I think that’s enough reason to keep the tradition alive.
And this entry is neither a condemnation of nor praise for standardized testing and a competitive grading environment. Despite being reminded of my averageness nearly every day for twelve years, I felt loved by my family, liked by my friends, and encouraged by my teachers. From them I built up enough self esteem to withstand the constant reminders of my averageness.
I suppose all I’m trying to say is that there’s no such thing as a trophy kid, at least as it exists as a label for an entire generation. It is a groundless slur used in senseless generational warfare. And I think it’s wrong to suggest that building self esteem in young people is something that should be frowned upon. My trophy kid generation had among the highest suicide rates in the last sixty years. Giving a low esteem kid a certificate to tack up on his wall or telling him he’s better at something than he really is, in the long run, won’t do him any harm.
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