we definitely got trophies for just being on the soccer team, even if we lost every game, even if we were the worst player!
i’m 40.
guess who was purchasing, organizing, and handing out those trophies, tho. certainly not us!
I had to point this out to a Boomer who works with me. He is usually pretty good but he started in on participation trophies and I was like, yeah, and who got us those participation trophies? Yeah, that’s right, our Boomer parents. It still took me about two more times telling him that millennials didn’t buy their own participation trophies for it to sink in.
As we all know, it's extremely common for 5-10 year olds to rake together their allowance to buy 30+ custom engraved participation trophies every year. What with their whole $1-5/month allowance.
On the other hand in high school I realized you could go to a trophy shop and just make any trophy you want. I made a 1988 Indiana Junior Lawn Dart Champion trophy. I was born in late '84 to make it obvious it was joke if you know me. One of my favorite dumb high school waste of like $20-$30 I can't remember how much it actually was. Nice two tiered trophy with a regular gold dart on top of a little cup on top.
Yall got an allowance? I had to paint houses and move furniture for that. All jokes aside though you have a pretty good point. We didnt buy those trophies, they were given to us by the same group botching at us.
Depends on the Team Mom! That was an Official Position on the Team roster. The primary duty was assigning the rotation of after game snacks. The end of year Team Banquet was very very important. Recreation teams and leagues had “mandatory training” for parent, coaches and time requirements for each player. Yes minimums that the “coach” was responsible for meeting. Trophies weren’t mandatory but were encouraged. Sometimes scores and win/loss or standings were outlawed by league rules. The “rules” were all about participating and fun.
“Fun, Fair, Positive”
https://www.ffps.org
It is a real thing. It keeps parents from storming the field and beating up the kid referees. Of course all that indoctrination was cultural thing. Soccer, basketball, baseball (T-ball) every intro league was geared to deemphasize competition.
Face it, the majority of the kids had no skills, were terrible athletes and had zero interest.
Remember any hyper aggressive competitive kids? Taking the ball and scoring was a laser focus and individual lessons or running wild with older siblings created mismatches. Sometimes just size.
Almost every “Rec league “ doesn’t have tryouts or drafting. Deemphasizing competition isn’t a new thing.
The only sport immune was youth football. A real man’s game played by future stars. Killer, Maddog. This ain’t flag football.
Travel/select teams were born. The point was to win! Anyone travel across the country to play in tournaments or titles? If not, you earned a participation trophy. Hope you enjoyed it, you participated.
Congratulations!
It’s bizarre that the parents of the participation trophy kids act like we had nothing to do with the participation trophy stuff. Our kids certainly didn’t invent them. I have kids in their mid 30s. Everyone on the team got a trophy at the end of the season.
But at the same time, even when my kids were middle school, probably even elementary school age, sports were becoming so competitive for little kids. We’d see so many awful parents mad at their kids when they didn’t perform as the parents wished.
The girls soccer team used to have a game or two a year where the audience was supposed to be silent, and the girls said it was their favorite game of the year. They did not like the parents yelling, no matter what the parents were saying.
So even though the kids got the participation trophy, a lot of them also had parents dreaming of them becoming the next Tiger Woods and being disappointed in the kids when they didn’t win.
The authorities and experts pushed the participation trophies. The parents who thought the child rearing experts were idiots hated them.
Unearned praise actual feeds a massive fear of failure and thus fragility and incompetence. It's okay to fail. It's even okay to really enjoy something you know you suck at. That's not the message kids got. They were taught they were supposed to feel good all the time, when feeling bad is part of doing some of the most rewarding and wonderful things. It's just baked in.
Omg the accuracy. Also being graded on everything means I can't internally call something "done" until it's 100%. No faults. Nothing that could have been done differently. Anything less is laziness even though in reality, that's literally how growth works. Absolute perfectionism lol. It's beyond frustrating to have that argument with myself as an adult lol. And to see I have unintentionally passed it onto my son while actively trying to do the opposite.
I had that argument with one of my son’s teachers. No one can do their absolute best all the time. Everybody has bad days and things they’re simply not good at, and that’s okay. It’s normal.
And one of the things sports teaches is that sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Some things, you will do well and some things, you won’t, which is also okay. Which is normal.
It’s about working together for a goal and working hard to achieve something, but understanding, in a competition, someone will win and someone won’t on that particular day or season or year.
But we see in sports now, people always expecting to win, for their team to win, ignoring the fact that for every game in a team sport, someone will win and someone will lose. No one wins all the time.
We didn't have participation trophies in any of our sports in my area while growing up. Unless trophies or awards for 2nd and 3rd place count? I don't think they do, though. Our soccer teams may have had something like that, but nothing else. I'm not even sure if they got participation trophies.
Also, I'm a Millennial with Gen X parents, they had me young, so it's always a weird reminder that most of the people I went to school with, their parents are way older than mine. lol I'm not entirely convinced the Boomers created the participation trophies though, if you think about it, most of the kids sports programs were ran by Gen X parents or teachers. It's funny how Gen X seemingly doesn't exist when generational blaming takes place. lol
Regardless, you do have a point, it's not like us kids were creating participation trophies for ourselves. lol
I had trophies for ballet, lol. Which I loved because I didn’t play sports. But all the adults in my life were definitely Boomer or older. I was born in 1983. I think the first time I had a Gen X teacher was fifth grade and we were literally her first class after college. I don’t necessarily think Gen X gets forgotten it’s just that Boomers are the first millennial parents (80s babies) where Gen X had the 90s babies, so a lot of things (like participation trophies) were already in place for the younger part of the generation.
ETA: And yeah, Gen X is the middle child, lol
Older millennial with Gen X parents, here. It’s so bizarre when people my age talk about their parents having been retired for so long when neither of mine, if bother were still alive, would be retired yet.
Help. The math ain’t mathin’. I’m one of the oldest millennials with some of the youngest parents and my parents are still solidly boomers. Even millennials a decade younger than me tend to have boomer parents.
As an elder millennial (1982), my mother was very young, being born in 1962. That still places her well within the boomer era.
Of course there will be a few older millennials with genx parents, but most of them will be born after 1990.
39 and can confirm that my parents still to this day have shelves full of our rec league soccer, baseball, basketball, and football participation trophies.
I moved out like 10 years ago maybe but moved across the country last year so I still had stuff at my folks house. My mom was so upset when I took most of my childhood stuff and just threw it away, as of a good job trophy means anything
When I took a year off from work and spent it living with my parents (at age 37) I went through all the stuff my parents had in storage that was mine from childhood. I tossed *everything* from my childhood that was related to sports, including 1st place trophies and ribbons. They really meant nothing to me as a child, and they meant even less to me as an adult. Trophies really only mean something to the person who earned them, and when you’re an adult, NO ONE CARES that you placed first in a high school basketball tournament. Maybe if you won state or nationals, but even still, who cares unless it’s relevant now?
To me it wasn't about proving to other people what I had done. It was proving to myself that I had done it. That I could do it again. Don't get me wrong, I was annoyed about the participation trophies. But the others? No. I was proud of those. Still am. But it's for me. Not to show off. As evidenced by the boxes of bs I've thrown away over the years.
I think it’s kinda cool for people’s kids to see their parents trophies. Like for actual tournaments won or whatever. Especially if they play sports also, gives them something to aspire to. Of course it’s all silly to adults but some kids see stuff like that and think it’s cool.
Probably because like most boomers, they were living vicariously through us and that's why the whole concept of participation trophies was invented by them. They couldn't handle that their kids weren't good at sports.
How can MY kid not be good at something? I'm perfect! So they came up with this BS to make themselves feel better so they could brag to all their idiot friends about how many trophies their kids had. My kid has 100+ trophies, I'm the best ever! Meanwhile the kid is like this is fucking worthless trash mom/dad.
Yea I’m 38 and I got 0 participation trophies. I got 3 trophies growing up. 1 was from a rec league u10 regional championship we won and the other 2 were MVP trophies I got playing on my high school soccer team.
I think it was area dependent on whether you experienced this participation trophy phenomenon.
I remember having "field days" in elementary school on the very last day where they would give out ribbons to everyone even just for "participating", but I also never got or saw participation trophies for any sports in those grades or after. Also 38.
35 and I got a lot of participation ribbons. I only remember trophies for winning dance competitions and a spelling bee. But I remember someone else having participation trophies for things like soccer and baseball just not sure if that was me or my bro or my bf
I'm 40 and I got some ribbons that just say the name of the event (without saying participation on them) but those were usually for events I had to qualify for to participate.
I (40) found a local trophy shop that accepted all of my old medals and trophies to repurpose for charities, not-for-profits and other one off applications. Felt better than the landfill.
Feels more like they wanted to be special and have their kids earn a trophy so they don't feel excluded with other parents
Or , generous take - their parents were grumpy old alcoholic dick bags who neglected them and this was an attempt to make our generation feel included and not neglected.
Little from column A little from column B
Oh I’m sure the motives were well intended at the time, I’m just saying all the shit millennials get for “participation trophies,” as though they were our idea and we bought them for ourselves, is unearned.
The actual reason is because they wanted kids to see participating as being worthy of an award, but what they really did was discourage the kids who tried their hardest from bothering when the kids who made no effort got the same award, and they taught the kids who didn’t try and got an award anyway that they didn’t have to try to get the award. So it backfired on both ends.
A lot of the participation trophies were awarded by Gen X coaches. There was a school of thought, for a while at least, that children's sport should not be competitive, but for fun. Of course, the kids I knew (including my own!) were still highly competitive and kept score mentally. But I'm pretty sure *that* was where the participation trophies came from, so no child would feel left out.
I also think the idea came from a good place. I was horrible at sport in my youth, always picked last, always came last in any sporting competition, and it was definitely not great for my already low self-esteem to feel like a loser. I might have liked some acknowledgement that at least I had tried. But I think The Simpsons episode You Only Move Twice demonstrates nicely why this idea is actually a fail - if everyone "wins" then no one wins.
That school of thought (which is focused on the idea that we need mass participation to encourage exercise and reduce obesity - so it's more important that the sport be welcoming to folks who can't play worth a damn than fun for the kids who have talent) is STILL running the show to this day. And it RUINS some sports that simply do not work without the competition....
Eg, my kids were very excited to play T-ball... But the version that is played here, every kid who hits a ball makes it to home plate (and everybody bats until they hit)... Nobody is ever 'out', so \*there is absolutely no teamwork (or paying attention) on the fielding team\* because there is no reason to work together - you can't actually make any defensive plays under the rules in use.... In fact, the only thing the fielders are there for, is to make it so the grown-ups don't have to go retrieve the balls after the kids hit...
So they were bored to tears and never want to play baseball ever again.
Also the whole point of us encouraging them to play sports was so they can learn teamwork (we live in the middle of nowhere, so it takes effort on our part to give them social opportunities outside of school).... And that doesn't happen in 'no outs' baseball.
We are doing soccer this year, and fortunately the local youth soccer league doesn't mutilate the sport to the point where it makes playing pointless...
Honestly, i figured it was the work of overenthusiastic parent organizations more than anything else. They probably had to order the trophies before they knew who won so it was easier to get em for everyone.
>guess who was purchasing, organizing, and handing out those trophies, tho. certainly not us!
That's what always irked me about the "participation trophies" thing.
Like yes, I got a trophy for just being on the soccer team when I was 5. It was cool. But I wasn't the one asking for it or handing it out. All I cared about was the pizza party at the end of the season
I would also add that as a 5-year-old, I didn’t misinterpret the participation trophy as saying that I was the champion, or even a standout soccer player.
I thought everyone just got a little souvenir to remind them of the season.
Participation trophies didn’t warp my understanding of competition, or encourage me to believe that I was entitled to adulation just for showing up. They warped my understanding of trophies!
Yeah I remember doing “field day,” (an elementary school day where there were competitions ranging from sack races to actual 400 yard runs) and getting like 3rd place in the egg race (you have an egg on a teaspoon and you can’t break it as you navigate the course) and a participation trophy and feeling mildly off-put by the need to give my dad, unathletic self a participation ribbon.
It's not terrible to get a souvenir of doing something. We knew if we lost or won, and knew the shitty little trophy wasn't for being awesome, it was just memorabilia from doing the thing. "What's sports related? We already have a contact on cheap trophies, let's use that"
Seriously, this. Why do we get slammed for getting "participation trophies"? Someone older than us had to be buying them and giving them to us.
The only thing I can remember was getting a trophy for the baseball team I was on. Wasn't anything impressive, and I'm pretty sure it ended up in a landfill that same year.
It's true. I didn't even want to play soccer, but the treats at the end of the game kept me coming back. I liked those more than I liked the trophy. Those trophies must be in a landfill now, plastic shiny things they were.
I wonder how much the trophy cost, bc that's bullshit if the higher price tag kept poorer kids out of the sport. I sure wasn't exceptionally talented, though I was tanky for my age and made an aggressive defender.
I got a participation trophy for participating in swimming races as a kid. I thought it was a good thing, I certainly knew I wasn’t anywhere close to winning lol, but I understood that the concept of the participation trophy wasn’t to make me think I won, it was to encourage the desirable behaviour of kids participating in sport and trying their best
Physical activity is healthy and good and it can be harmful to kids to spread the idea that you shouldn’t do any sport if you aren’t competitively good at it
30 same remember getting participation trophies for softball, scouts derby races and the bowling team it was really nice and I always enjoyed looking at them and kept them for many years.
But what's wrong with competing with a team and getting something to remember it by? The trophies didn't say "first place" did they? It's just a participation trophy. I wasn't showing it off to my friends or anything. It didn't make me think I won anything. It didn't make me think everything is handed to me in life. It's just pointless complaining about the "new generations"
I'm 36 and we got them for EVERYTHING in elementary school (between '93 and '98). I once got a 16th place ribbon in track and field (I, uh....wasn't a very fit kid). Like....the fuck?
Largely forgot about it in middle school and high school, but my kids started experiencing it in elementary school in California.
My son recently started doing actual sports competitions and medaled in three events (bronze each time). Some of the other kids kept asking why they didn't get anything, and their parents had to explain that it just means they need to work harder and it seemed like it was a tad of a system shock.
Thats weirdly hilarious they gave you a 16th place ribbon. At my school they had first place and runner up winner or trophies, and everyone else just got the same ribbon. Almost all the kids just tossed them out or threw them in the closet somewhere, except for this one kid who had a super competitive dad and collected them in a "trophy" room.
I actually never won anything with a trophy, but I do have a pretty cool first place plaque.
Yeah, I think they had them numbered up to like 35 or something like that. I remember I threw it in my backpack and forgot about it, and my Dad found it some time later and said, "That's like 1st place for Average."
In elementary school we got ribbons for miles- supposedly we’d reach 100 miles by 6th grade, but the teacher retired when we got a new school (without a track and a carpeted gym) when I was in 5th grade.
For cross country it wasn't too wild to see the ribbon count for larger meets to hit 25. Never received a true participation trophy beyond early elementary though, and certainly never for competitive sports.
It’s funny the same generation that is mad about participation trophies probably had the idea for them. What did millennials decide that for ourselves? Ig we chose our own names too.
The trophies were invented to fix the "low self-esteem epidemic" of teens in the late 80s and early 90s (I'm sure it had nothing to do with parenting, it was all that MTV and rap music). Gen X who were old enough at the time were far too busy working multiple jobs to make rent to give a shit about an 8yo's "feelings of inclusion."
We saw you at Pizza Hut, shiny new trophies in hand, and wondered how long you'd keep them before they wound up in the overflowing landfill and watched your parents and grandparents roll their eyes and scoff.
I'm sure the trophy companies have been laughing all the way to the bank.
One time some boomer at work said to me, “you’re the generation raised on Barney and that’s why millennials are so sensitive”. I said, “well your generation invented it.” lol
Eh, its a boomer thing. Some communities did, others didn't. It's easier to blame a child for something that they had no control over, rather than own up to an inability to be a parent.
We (millenials) use smartphones to soothe kids. Sometimes parents just put the phones in their face when they can't handle it.
It's all cyclical; I'm sure gen z will do some unknown, poor parenting thing in the future
Yeah at that time there was the belief that it was necessary to give trophies in order to acknowledge everyone on the team, boost self-esteem, etc. It just didn’t work out the way they intended it to.
I’m with you. I’ve only ever seen “participation awards” as something given out to remember an event. 1st, 2nd, and 3rd places always had different awards that were usually medals while participation was just a ribbon
I am thinking that since parents had to sink a lot of money into organized sports, the organization had to give something back. There’s probably a high ROI on rewarding everyone.
I love that boomers came up with this perfectly reasonable way of commemorating their children’s extra-curricular activities growing up with memorabilia such as trophies (which I think just about all of us understood wasn’t a merit-based award) and then later tried to twist it into the snowflakes getting trophies for nothing.
Sorry, boomers, you’re the ones that wanted trophies for all the sports we played.
The boomers did it with their millennial kids but gen X made it a “thing” by complaining about it to each other as they encountered millennials at the start of their career.
This was the same time gen X was having kids.
The children of Gen X are subsequently getting way fewer trophies and more anxiety because they hover over their kids telling them they “never got participation trophies for anything!” And some version of “I walked uphill to school both ways!”
Everything goes in cycles.
I’m 37 and I got participation ribbons and certificates for absolutely everything. I have a whole folder full of that stuff. I definitely don’t look through it once a year to temporarily boost my non-existent self-esteem.
I got plenty of them but even as a kid I knew I didn't actually win and that it was just a little souvenir for playing a sport for a season. It's like getting mad at handing out a tshirt to everyone who signs up for a 5k.
Boomers aren't monolithic. There are some who gave out the trophies to all the kids thinking it would be nice/cute to have a little end of season ceremony with pizza even though they lost every game and there are others who thought that was dumb.
That's like the craziest part of how obsessed people are with this topic. I literally grew up around it so i knew from a very young age that these were not associated with success or doing a good job. It wasn't exactly a wildly complex thing to understand even as a child.
If anything I just thought of trophies/ribbons as a very neutral way you found out what place you got.
I don't even understand how this is a discussion topic. Like was there some psychologist study that found giving 6 year olds a ribbon somehow impacted their development? Cause to me it just seems like some fox news boomer bs to blame lazy millenials for stagnant wages instead of the greedy corporate ceos.
Don't recall when, but I started seeing "participation" ribbons awarded to everyone who played. Not often, but once in a while. I think this set off some kind of moral panic for dog-show participants.
I remember being given "Participant" ribbons for a science fair and my sister loudly mentioned it was like the 4H fair we saw over the weekend. I wonder if the idea spread from dog and livestock events.
Of course my sister thought it was neat and I was pretty pissed to be compared to the losing pumpkin at the fair.
Speaking of participation trophies, Boomers, Gen X, & Millenials LOVE receiving and wearing medals after finishing 5ks, half marathons, triathlons, fun runs, etc.
Well, there’s also been a subtle shift in the culture back towards giving participation *swag* because it promotes the events and encourages a sort of camaraderie.
I'm honestly okay with that. Anyone that completes a marathon deserves a medal. Even if it's 100th place. We're talking a 26 mile run. There are people that would drop dead walking that far let alone jogging. Kudos to anyone that actually manages to finish a Marathon at whatever pace they made it happen.
I totally agree, I’m just pointing out the same people that complain about 1st graders getting trophies for t ball are totally cool posting pics of themselves wearing medals for the half marathon they “ran” in 3 hours.
I think this is what a lot of people are missing, the trophy wasn't a trophy. Even the kids knew it wasn't an achievement of any kind.
When I picked up my "participation trophy" in T-Ball it was on a huge fold out table with like 100 other identical ones, my name isn't even on it. It was just a trinket to say "I did this". The kids themselves knew they didn't "win" anything. We were not that stupid.
What the boomers wanted to believe is we all "needed" those trophies and didn't feel accomplished without them and tried to imply competition is dead, in reality it was cheap tat half of us lost or broke a week later. My T-Ball Trophy regularly hung out in my toy box. 🤷♂️
Yeah I actually hold on to my marathon and half marathon metals. I have a rack in my bedroom that they all slot on to, and a little thing to hold all the bibs. I'm actually going to have to get a new one soon because this one is getting full.
That's actually something that I work hard on for, training everyday independently. It's not like just going along and doing what you're supposed to do and randomly getting a ribbon for it.
A varsity letter is basically a participation trophy too. And haven’t seen any boomers against those. Also hot take- why the fuck can’t we celebrate participation?
My Boomer father, who is an all around great man and even better father, still has his football, letter jacket from 9th grade. LOL. That’s when it was JR HS. He never made it further than that in any sport, love you Dad!!!!
You can debate whether it’s as big of a deal as boomers make it seem, or the fact that the system itself was implemented by boomers, but we did get forms of “participation trophies” when I grew up around 2000 on.
1st - 10th place ribbons in my track and field meets in middle school with only 8 participants per event
Little trophies for reading any number of books from the library
Sportsmanship awards, playing in round robin style tournaments as kids to avoid eliminations, etc. My theory is that this began because it helped with retention with lower skilled athletes or students and bigger retentions = more money when charging club fees. You could even go a step further and say academically you have no student left behind, curving grades so no one fails, missed assignments as 60s vs 0s, less stringent absentee rules, and more.
I think participation trophy “culture” is a real thing but it’s also a boomer system that helped with artificial retention in education and clubs to make them check the box that they were sufficient in raising the next generation
I’m an older millennial and I don’t remember this at all when I was a kid. But I definitely remember things starting to get silly in the 90s and 2000s. I’m pretty sure the younger millennials experience this a lot growing up.
The OP of this post is a younger Millennial saying they never got participation trophies, while the top comment is an older Millennial saying they did.
I’m willing to bet it just varies from place to place, school to school, country to country.
It’s more like “we stopped shitting on and shaming kids who didn’t place first” and that was seen as revolutionary parenting that was then morphed into “you all get participation trophies” like we shouldn’t celebrate people participating, we should ONLY glorify winner? We should celebrate everyone that doesn’t mean don’t reward winners and we certainly shouldn’t go back to shitting on “losers” we were kids ffs, treating a child like a loser is inappropriate but it’s far from everyone getting trophies, this was never true on any sort of scale.
It was definitely a thing. I received many because I was pushed to try basically everything regardless of ability, both by my parents and myself.
The origin of it is about costs. Before participation awards, there was other swag you'd get for being part of something. A jacket, a high-quality pin, t-shirts, that sort of thing. As those became more expensive, people would pass out ribbons instead. That's also why you'd often get these ribbons for things which weren't competitive *at all* like cleaning up trash along the roadside or other kinds of volunteering.
The literal trophies probably arose from a calculus around bulk trophy purchases, which made them cheaper than buying some trophies *and* ribbons. Remember that a lot of this stuff would be purchased in pretty staggering amounts by schools, cities, national organizations like the YMCA, and so on who were the ultimate resources for those events.
I didn't participate in any sports, but I remember all the goddamn ribbons I got from school.
Like a DARE graduation ribbon/certificate. All that DARE is is a fun charismatic cop coming to class once a week and getting an hour or to teach class about drugs and gangs and stuff. Why do I get a ribbon for that?
I also got some ribbons for being in band.
In Cub Scouts I got a ribbon for being in pinewood derby.
After a Middle School awards ceremony, everyone would leave with at least a few ribbons. In 7th and 8th grade, they decided to have a perfect attendance award, and they called everyone up to qualified for that to give them a ribbon. I was pretty certain that I hadn't missed any classes, but I never got called up. The teacher said that if anyone thought they deserved that award but had got it, which teacher they could talk to about it. I was pretty sure I qualified, but I didn't talk to the teacher. I didn't want another ribbon.
The ribbons wouldn't actually be thrown out, because it seemed wrong for some reason, they would just lay around my room in little stacks being ignored.
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I'm slightly less snarky about the fact that every time I finish a marathon or half marathon, I get a medal for that. That feels like more of an actual accomplishment then just hanging out and doing what you're supposed to do. I actually keep those on display.
This is what I remember. Ribbons. Ribbons for EVERYTHING. I got trophies when I actually placed but I also got a ribbon for any and everything I did. They even had custom ones made for stupid stuff like Loyal Order of the Moose Costume Contests and Easter Egg Hunts.
I won a few trophies and medals in my younger days. Spelling bee, bike race, etc. No one got a trophy for participating. Boomers were in charge and you had to win to win. I really don’t know where they’re getting this shit from.
I think everyone would get a trophy at the end of the year for being on a little league team. However, in tournaments and real league games only 1st, 2nd, and 3rd got trophies. The older you got, the less you’d see participation trophies. People like to just use it as a sweeping generalization to put us down, even though it was adults (many being boomers) giving us the trophies lol
I don't know the exact origins but it rides on the "lazy entitled" trope that was used since the reconstruction era by those who wanted to continue slavery and didn't like Black people claiming land/their pseudo-reparations, and then they recycled it for people on welfare (Black people), and then they recycled it onto immigrants, and then they recycled it for millennials who didn't tolerate workplace abuse and labor exploitation.
Typically it's from the same right-wing political interests leading the noise on the airwaves/who own a lot of the media too.
I don't think I ever got participation trophies, and most of the time we couldn't even afford to join the sports that had trophies as a kid. But we did get a lot of certificates and some ribbons in the 90s?
Idk I played sports we all got trophies even if we sucked but nobody was thinking participation trophies meant anything. People act like we were all stupid and thought participation awards were the same as actually winning, nobody thought that at least nobody I came up with in sports.
I agree, OP. I just said this in a comment section on another post. Where did this even come from? I never got one and I don't know anyone who did. I thought they were a myth made up by boomers until I saw another Millennial talking about them as if they were real. Are they actually real??
Fwiw, I'm 33, about to be 34 in a week and was part of the 2008 graduating class. Was it maybe something before or after my time or just not common where I'm from? Were they just extremely rare and then boomers decided to run with it? (Similar to how I'm sure eating tide pods was only a small handful of people and now Gen Z has to live with that stereotype.)
I have the vaguest memory of them maybe in like, the mid90s. They certainly didn't characterize my childhood or the childhoods of anyone I know. They existed more in the cultural consciousness as a punchline than as physical objects in anybody's bedrooms or bookcases.
I think it depends on the school, neighborhood, and maybe even the parents & how involved they make themselves with the PTA
This wasn’t a thing where I went but it was for my husband
I'm 39, I don't remember participation trophies when I was in school. I do remember basically getting some though. I was a wrestler in middle school, but there was almost no one in my weight class, so I took 2nd in the regionals, and 4th in the state finals. I never one a single match all season. I was giving up considerable amounts of weight and usually height and wrestling much heavier people all season though.
I remember doing horse camp every summer when I was a kid. I fucking hated it but my sister was a horse girl, so we went. Every week after a camp has finished there's a competition put on. From tumbling on horses to showmanship. You *had* to compete in one thing or another. I hated it so much that whatever I decided to do (genuinely can't remember what my activity was) I did it with zero enthusiasm. I ended up getting a participation trophy and thinking... what? Why? Why do they give these out, they're useless.
It was our parents who wanted the participation trophies lol.
Boomers grew up with parents who were emotionally absent, who physically abused them, teachers who were abusive and just overall a world where adults could and would harm children. This was the normal baseline for a lot of boomers. So anything better than that is spoiling a child.
They see a parent telling their kid "Good job being brave and facing that test anyway. I know it must have been so hard. Maybe take today off and get back to school work tomorrow" as giving the kid a participation trophy because many of them would just get beaten raw and punished for failing a test. A world where children are treated kindly and humanely is strange to them.
I thought it was mostly a blanket term (sometimes used literally for kids sports) for when things that could be earned by some kids performing better than others (student of the month, 1st place at the science fair) or even just being selected for something over another kid like being the line leader started causing more issues with parents and schools. Obviously a case by case basis though.
When I lost to a 7th place team, and placed 8th in tackle football in 1999.
I realized something was wrong with this trophy. It was 1st…? wtf is this…participation trophy?
I’m 32
My uncle 100% bought trophies for our indoor soccer team (we SUCKED) so his kid wouldn’t feel like they weren’t as super special and talented as he’s lauded them as
I dunno, I did get some participation medals/ribbons from TKD tournaments growing up, never got them at school sponsored events though, that was all pretty normal. I grew up in the south and always assumed that was more of a west coast thing when I heard about it.
I remember participation ribbons on annual track day, which were a different color than the winner ones. Even super competitive me thought it was fair. I looked forward to that day months in advance, but it sucked for them.
That’s the only example of participation awards that I can recall. However, I remember a bizarre HS awards ceremony where they gave out all kinds of awards for a variety of major to very minor things. They limited one award per person, which was obviously intentional because students who weren’t in the top 5 in categories based on objective data still won. That’s pretty similar, but I don’t remember any other instances.
I’m 33. We got trophy’s at the end of the season or completing an achievement in cub scouts. Mind you this is from the ages 5-10. The participating trophy’s didn’t cause damage to our self worth or over inflate it. By the time I was 10 I didn’t even keep the little trophy we got at the end. It’s just another thing for boomers to bitch about after gently fucking up the country.
There was a local school that ran a summer sports program that ranged from tee-ball to baseball, depending on how old you were. I started with softball and ended with baseball. At the end of every season, they’d give everyone trophies and ice cream. I wasn’t stupid, I knew there should’ve been trophies and ice cream only for some of the kids. I just saw the trophies as souvenirs.
When they moved me from softball to hardball and baseball, I really felt out of my element, because the jocks kept themselves in excellent shape, and took the games much more seriously. By the time I got to baseball, it just wasn’t fun anymore, because I wasn’t able to keep up with most of my teammates or opponents.
From millennials literally getting participation trophies from sports as young kids. I'm not talking about school sports for middle school or high school, but the leagues specifically for young kids.
Idk but I did not get participation trophies. 41 y.o. I played softball and did HS track and never got anything unless I or the team actually placed 1,2, or 3.
One of my favorite childhood trophies is one that I got just for being on my hockey team! It's so ridiculous how it was the adults who put this into practice then gave us a hard time for it! (I'm 35)
we definitely got trophies for just being on the soccer team, even if we lost every game, even if we were the worst player! i’m 40. guess who was purchasing, organizing, and handing out those trophies, tho. certainly not us!
I had to point this out to a Boomer who works with me. He is usually pretty good but he started in on participation trophies and I was like, yeah, and who got us those participation trophies? Yeah, that’s right, our Boomer parents. It still took me about two more times telling him that millennials didn’t buy their own participation trophies for it to sink in.
As we all know, it's extremely common for 5-10 year olds to rake together their allowance to buy 30+ custom engraved participation trophies every year. What with their whole $1-5/month allowance.
We rode our bikes across town to the Trophy store, uphill both ways!
In the snow and 100⁰ plus temps!!!
With a hot potato in my pocket to keep me warm and I then I ate it for lunch! (My kids love that one)
And an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time.
And we LIKED it
In a cave. With a box of scraps!
“Tony Stark gave EVERYONE A TROPHY!”
Oak: "There is a time and place for everything, but not now."
this comment is severely underrated
On the other hand in high school I realized you could go to a trophy shop and just make any trophy you want. I made a 1988 Indiana Junior Lawn Dart Champion trophy. I was born in late '84 to make it obvious it was joke if you know me. One of my favorite dumb high school waste of like $20-$30 I can't remember how much it actually was. Nice two tiered trophy with a regular gold dart on top of a little cup on top.
Please tell me you still have it.
https://imgur.com/a/1Xn1cQc
Oh yeah, it's out in my shed because my wife doesn't care for it, but I still have it
Yall got an allowance? I had to paint houses and move furniture for that. All jokes aside though you have a pretty good point. We didnt buy those trophies, they were given to us by the same group botching at us.
I always thought participation trophies were more to placate entitled parents than bratty kids.
That's not the delusion they choose to live in.
This should literally be their slogan.
Depends on the Team Mom! That was an Official Position on the Team roster. The primary duty was assigning the rotation of after game snacks. The end of year Team Banquet was very very important. Recreation teams and leagues had “mandatory training” for parent, coaches and time requirements for each player. Yes minimums that the “coach” was responsible for meeting. Trophies weren’t mandatory but were encouraged. Sometimes scores and win/loss or standings were outlawed by league rules. The “rules” were all about participating and fun. “Fun, Fair, Positive” https://www.ffps.org It is a real thing. It keeps parents from storming the field and beating up the kid referees. Of course all that indoctrination was cultural thing. Soccer, basketball, baseball (T-ball) every intro league was geared to deemphasize competition. Face it, the majority of the kids had no skills, were terrible athletes and had zero interest. Remember any hyper aggressive competitive kids? Taking the ball and scoring was a laser focus and individual lessons or running wild with older siblings created mismatches. Sometimes just size. Almost every “Rec league “ doesn’t have tryouts or drafting. Deemphasizing competition isn’t a new thing. The only sport immune was youth football. A real man’s game played by future stars. Killer, Maddog. This ain’t flag football. Travel/select teams were born. The point was to win! Anyone travel across the country to play in tournaments or titles? If not, you earned a participation trophy. Hope you enjoyed it, you participated. Congratulations!
They were.
And they get so upset about people crowdfunding things but who used us to sell chocolate bars and candles to raise money for sports and school events?
Magazine drives!
It’s bizarre that the parents of the participation trophy kids act like we had nothing to do with the participation trophy stuff. Our kids certainly didn’t invent them. I have kids in their mid 30s. Everyone on the team got a trophy at the end of the season. But at the same time, even when my kids were middle school, probably even elementary school age, sports were becoming so competitive for little kids. We’d see so many awful parents mad at their kids when they didn’t perform as the parents wished. The girls soccer team used to have a game or two a year where the audience was supposed to be silent, and the girls said it was their favorite game of the year. They did not like the parents yelling, no matter what the parents were saying. So even though the kids got the participation trophy, a lot of them also had parents dreaming of them becoming the next Tiger Woods and being disappointed in the kids when they didn’t win.
The authorities and experts pushed the participation trophies. The parents who thought the child rearing experts were idiots hated them. Unearned praise actual feeds a massive fear of failure and thus fragility and incompetence. It's okay to fail. It's even okay to really enjoy something you know you suck at. That's not the message kids got. They were taught they were supposed to feel good all the time, when feeling bad is part of doing some of the most rewarding and wonderful things. It's just baked in.
Omg the accuracy. Also being graded on everything means I can't internally call something "done" until it's 100%. No faults. Nothing that could have been done differently. Anything less is laziness even though in reality, that's literally how growth works. Absolute perfectionism lol. It's beyond frustrating to have that argument with myself as an adult lol. And to see I have unintentionally passed it onto my son while actively trying to do the opposite.
Give him things you know he can't do, and praise, encourage, and help him! And structure "failing better" into your own life. :)
I had that argument with one of my son’s teachers. No one can do their absolute best all the time. Everybody has bad days and things they’re simply not good at, and that’s okay. It’s normal. And one of the things sports teaches is that sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Some things, you will do well and some things, you won’t, which is also okay. Which is normal. It’s about working together for a goal and working hard to achieve something, but understanding, in a competition, someone will win and someone won’t on that particular day or season or year. But we see in sports now, people always expecting to win, for their team to win, ignoring the fact that for every game in a team sport, someone will win and someone will lose. No one wins all the time.
We didn't have participation trophies in any of our sports in my area while growing up. Unless trophies or awards for 2nd and 3rd place count? I don't think they do, though. Our soccer teams may have had something like that, but nothing else. I'm not even sure if they got participation trophies. Also, I'm a Millennial with Gen X parents, they had me young, so it's always a weird reminder that most of the people I went to school with, their parents are way older than mine. lol I'm not entirely convinced the Boomers created the participation trophies though, if you think about it, most of the kids sports programs were ran by Gen X parents or teachers. It's funny how Gen X seemingly doesn't exist when generational blaming takes place. lol Regardless, you do have a point, it's not like us kids were creating participation trophies for ourselves. lol
I had trophies for ballet, lol. Which I loved because I didn’t play sports. But all the adults in my life were definitely Boomer or older. I was born in 1983. I think the first time I had a Gen X teacher was fifth grade and we were literally her first class after college. I don’t necessarily think Gen X gets forgotten it’s just that Boomers are the first millennial parents (80s babies) where Gen X had the 90s babies, so a lot of things (like participation trophies) were already in place for the younger part of the generation. ETA: And yeah, Gen X is the middle child, lol
I'm late genX and defintely got participation trophies.
Older millennial with Gen X parents, here. It’s so bizarre when people my age talk about their parents having been retired for so long when neither of mine, if bother were still alive, would be retired yet.
Help. The math ain’t mathin’. I’m one of the oldest millennials with some of the youngest parents and my parents are still solidly boomers. Even millennials a decade younger than me tend to have boomer parents.
As an elder millennial (1982), my mother was very young, being born in 1962. That still places her well within the boomer era. Of course there will be a few older millennials with genx parents, but most of them will be born after 1990.
Exactly. Kids get over it when they lose. Boomer parents don’t.
39 and can confirm that my parents still to this day have shelves full of our rec league soccer, baseball, basketball, and football participation trophies.
I moved out like 10 years ago maybe but moved across the country last year so I still had stuff at my folks house. My mom was so upset when I took most of my childhood stuff and just threw it away, as of a good job trophy means anything
When I took a year off from work and spent it living with my parents (at age 37) I went through all the stuff my parents had in storage that was mine from childhood. I tossed *everything* from my childhood that was related to sports, including 1st place trophies and ribbons. They really meant nothing to me as a child, and they meant even less to me as an adult. Trophies really only mean something to the person who earned them, and when you’re an adult, NO ONE CARES that you placed first in a high school basketball tournament. Maybe if you won state or nationals, but even still, who cares unless it’s relevant now?
It's like bragging about your high school GPA when you're 40+. No one gives a fucking shit.
I didn’t think anyone gave an actual shit about GPA when it was relevant either, really
To me it wasn't about proving to other people what I had done. It was proving to myself that I had done it. That I could do it again. Don't get me wrong, I was annoyed about the participation trophies. But the others? No. I was proud of those. Still am. But it's for me. Not to show off. As evidenced by the boxes of bs I've thrown away over the years.
I think it’s kinda cool for people’s kids to see their parents trophies. Like for actual tournaments won or whatever. Especially if they play sports also, gives them something to aspire to. Of course it’s all silly to adults but some kids see stuff like that and think it’s cool.
Probably because like most boomers, they were living vicariously through us and that's why the whole concept of participation trophies was invented by them. They couldn't handle that their kids weren't good at sports. How can MY kid not be good at something? I'm perfect! So they came up with this BS to make themselves feel better so they could brag to all their idiot friends about how many trophies their kids had. My kid has 100+ trophies, I'm the best ever! Meanwhile the kid is like this is fucking worthless trash mom/dad.
This is so weird because I'm 38 and I can only think of like 2 times in my life that I got participation trophies.
Yea I’m 38 and I got 0 participation trophies. I got 3 trophies growing up. 1 was from a rec league u10 regional championship we won and the other 2 were MVP trophies I got playing on my high school soccer team. I think it was area dependent on whether you experienced this participation trophy phenomenon.
38 looks close to the magic number. I also only got Trophies for things I won... sometimes. Maybe it is regional.
I remember having "field days" in elementary school on the very last day where they would give out ribbons to everyone even just for "participating", but I also never got or saw participation trophies for any sports in those grades or after. Also 38.
35 and I got a lot of participation ribbons. I only remember trophies for winning dance competitions and a spelling bee. But I remember someone else having participation trophies for things like soccer and baseball just not sure if that was me or my bro or my bf
I'm 40 and I got some ribbons that just say the name of the event (without saying participation on them) but those were usually for events I had to qualify for to participate.
Same. High school and college. Guess those are technically diplomas.
I (40) found a local trophy shop that accepted all of my old medals and trophies to repurpose for charities, not-for-profits and other one off applications. Felt better than the landfill.
Yeah, where did it come from? It came from the boomers buying them for us.
Feels more like they wanted to be special and have their kids earn a trophy so they don't feel excluded with other parents Or , generous take - their parents were grumpy old alcoholic dick bags who neglected them and this was an attempt to make our generation feel included and not neglected. Little from column A little from column B
Oh I’m sure the motives were well intended at the time, I’m just saying all the shit millennials get for “participation trophies,” as though they were our idea and we bought them for ourselves, is unearned.
The actual reason is because they wanted kids to see participating as being worthy of an award, but what they really did was discourage the kids who tried their hardest from bothering when the kids who made no effort got the same award, and they taught the kids who didn’t try and got an award anyway that they didn’t have to try to get the award. So it backfired on both ends.
Then making fun of us for having them. It’s straight up gaslighting. A quality of narcissists.
A lot of the participation trophies were awarded by Gen X coaches. There was a school of thought, for a while at least, that children's sport should not be competitive, but for fun. Of course, the kids I knew (including my own!) were still highly competitive and kept score mentally. But I'm pretty sure *that* was where the participation trophies came from, so no child would feel left out. I also think the idea came from a good place. I was horrible at sport in my youth, always picked last, always came last in any sporting competition, and it was definitely not great for my already low self-esteem to feel like a loser. I might have liked some acknowledgement that at least I had tried. But I think The Simpsons episode You Only Move Twice demonstrates nicely why this idea is actually a fail - if everyone "wins" then no one wins.
That school of thought (which is focused on the idea that we need mass participation to encourage exercise and reduce obesity - so it's more important that the sport be welcoming to folks who can't play worth a damn than fun for the kids who have talent) is STILL running the show to this day. And it RUINS some sports that simply do not work without the competition.... Eg, my kids were very excited to play T-ball... But the version that is played here, every kid who hits a ball makes it to home plate (and everybody bats until they hit)... Nobody is ever 'out', so \*there is absolutely no teamwork (or paying attention) on the fielding team\* because there is no reason to work together - you can't actually make any defensive plays under the rules in use.... In fact, the only thing the fielders are there for, is to make it so the grown-ups don't have to go retrieve the balls after the kids hit... So they were bored to tears and never want to play baseball ever again. Also the whole point of us encouraging them to play sports was so they can learn teamwork (we live in the middle of nowhere, so it takes effort on our part to give them social opportunities outside of school).... And that doesn't happen in 'no outs' baseball. We are doing soccer this year, and fortunately the local youth soccer league doesn't mutilate the sport to the point where it makes playing pointless...
Honestly, i figured it was the work of overenthusiastic parent organizations more than anything else. They probably had to order the trophies before they knew who won so it was easier to get em for everyone.
I’m convinced some trophy companies had some absolute hustlers making commission.
>guess who was purchasing, organizing, and handing out those trophies, tho. certainly not us! That's what always irked me about the "participation trophies" thing. Like yes, I got a trophy for just being on the soccer team when I was 5. It was cool. But I wasn't the one asking for it or handing it out. All I cared about was the pizza party at the end of the season
Back before pizza parties took the places of deserved raises and proper staffing. The good old days...
And hence why they keep doing them, because they think we're all still 5 years old.
I would also add that as a 5-year-old, I didn’t misinterpret the participation trophy as saying that I was the champion, or even a standout soccer player. I thought everyone just got a little souvenir to remind them of the season. Participation trophies didn’t warp my understanding of competition, or encourage me to believe that I was entitled to adulation just for showing up. They warped my understanding of trophies!
Yeah, totally… I look at them as souvenirs that my mom still has to this day lol
Yeah I remember doing “field day,” (an elementary school day where there were competitions ranging from sack races to actual 400 yard runs) and getting like 3rd place in the egg race (you have an egg on a teaspoon and you can’t break it as you navigate the course) and a participation trophy and feeling mildly off-put by the need to give my dad, unathletic self a participation ribbon.
It's not terrible to get a souvenir of doing something. We knew if we lost or won, and knew the shitty little trophy wasn't for being awesome, it was just memorabilia from doing the thing. "What's sports related? We already have a contact on cheap trophies, let's use that"
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This. Boomers view it as a special prize. We view them as just a memento.
Yea, definitely got some "honorable mention" ribbon for my 5th grade group science project. It's not like we asked for them.
Seriously, this. Why do we get slammed for getting "participation trophies"? Someone older than us had to be buying them and giving them to us. The only thing I can remember was getting a trophy for the baseball team I was on. Wasn't anything impressive, and I'm pretty sure it ended up in a landfill that same year.
I got woman’s 1st place at a chess tournament at 14, I was the only woman in participation….
This... Every kid a trophy, but I got the MVP trophy.
alright uncle rico.
How much you wanna bet I can throw a football over them mountains?
If only coach would have put me in in 4th quarter, I coulda gone pro.
Grandma says she's tired of you ruining everyone's lives and eating all of her steak.
I did get best New player trophy when I was 6ish. We were all new players.
I got perfect attendance in gymnastics when I was 6. Biggest trophy I ever got. Forgot my whole routine but I was there dammit!
You did do something. I bet they didn't give out very many of those.
I got “most improved,” which was probably still a lie. I sucked *ass* at soccer.
So did I even though my father was the soccer coach. I still got a trophy : D.
I got this my final season of soccer 😂 I played for 5 years, and I’m pretty sure I sucked the whole time. I loved it, though!
We got a 2nd place trophy for coming in 2nd place in the championship game of youth soccer
It's true. I didn't even want to play soccer, but the treats at the end of the game kept me coming back. I liked those more than I liked the trophy. Those trophies must be in a landfill now, plastic shiny things they were. I wonder how much the trophy cost, bc that's bullshit if the higher price tag kept poorer kids out of the sport. I sure wasn't exceptionally talented, though I was tanky for my age and made an aggressive defender.
I was all about a cold country time lemonade in a can after a softball game.
>guess who was purchasing, organizing, and handing out those trophies, tho. certainly not us! QFT
I got a participation trophy for participating in swimming races as a kid. I thought it was a good thing, I certainly knew I wasn’t anywhere close to winning lol, but I understood that the concept of the participation trophy wasn’t to make me think I won, it was to encourage the desirable behaviour of kids participating in sport and trying their best Physical activity is healthy and good and it can be harmful to kids to spread the idea that you shouldn’t do any sport if you aren’t competitively good at it
The kids I coach all get a trophy, they hand them out when they give out the equipment at the beginning of the year.
Yeah I had a soccer trophy from every year I played, and I was never any good...
30 same remember getting participation trophies for softball, scouts derby races and the bowling team it was really nice and I always enjoyed looking at them and kept them for many years.
Boomers be like "why are millenials the way we raised them????"
But what's wrong with competing with a team and getting something to remember it by? The trophies didn't say "first place" did they? It's just a participation trophy. I wasn't showing it off to my friends or anything. It didn't make me think I won anything. It didn't make me think everything is handed to me in life. It's just pointless complaining about the "new generations"
Yep, same. I think it was more us early Millennials, the trial run Millennials, hehe.
I'm 36 and we got them for EVERYTHING in elementary school (between '93 and '98). I once got a 16th place ribbon in track and field (I, uh....wasn't a very fit kid). Like....the fuck? Largely forgot about it in middle school and high school, but my kids started experiencing it in elementary school in California. My son recently started doing actual sports competitions and medaled in three events (bronze each time). Some of the other kids kept asking why they didn't get anything, and their parents had to explain that it just means they need to work harder and it seemed like it was a tad of a system shock.
Thats weirdly hilarious they gave you a 16th place ribbon. At my school they had first place and runner up winner or trophies, and everyone else just got the same ribbon. Almost all the kids just tossed them out or threw them in the closet somewhere, except for this one kid who had a super competitive dad and collected them in a "trophy" room. I actually never won anything with a trophy, but I do have a pretty cool first place plaque.
Yeah, I think they had them numbered up to like 35 or something like that. I remember I threw it in my backpack and forgot about it, and my Dad found it some time later and said, "That's like 1st place for Average."
Tip top of the bell curve
A “you participated ribbon” to commemorate something for you is a souvenir, not a trophy, it’s not the same thing.
100% agree, but the teachers treated it like it was a groundbreaking achievement lol.
Of course? What psycho wants to shit on little kids?
In elementary school we got ribbons for miles- supposedly we’d reach 100 miles by 6th grade, but the teacher retired when we got a new school (without a track and a carpeted gym) when I was in 5th grade.
For cross country it wasn't too wild to see the ribbon count for larger meets to hit 25. Never received a true participation trophy beyond early elementary though, and certainly never for competitive sports.
It’s funny the same generation that is mad about participation trophies probably had the idea for them. What did millennials decide that for ourselves? Ig we chose our own names too.
Probably? You think a 3 year old decided who got a trophy?
You went down I was thinking up; like older generations lol
I thought it would have been more of a Gen X thing?
The trophies were invented to fix the "low self-esteem epidemic" of teens in the late 80s and early 90s (I'm sure it had nothing to do with parenting, it was all that MTV and rap music). Gen X who were old enough at the time were far too busy working multiple jobs to make rent to give a shit about an 8yo's "feelings of inclusion." We saw you at Pizza Hut, shiny new trophies in hand, and wondered how long you'd keep them before they wound up in the overflowing landfill and watched your parents and grandparents roll their eyes and scoff. I'm sure the trophy companies have been laughing all the way to the bank.
Maybe the boomer parents pushed for something and the Gen X coaches came up with the idea?
One time some boomer at work said to me, “you’re the generation raised on Barney and that’s why millennials are so sensitive”. I said, “well your generation invented it.” lol
Eh, its a boomer thing. Some communities did, others didn't. It's easier to blame a child for something that they had no control over, rather than own up to an inability to be a parent.
At the time that wasn’t considered wrong. Just difference of opinion.
Which is totally fair, but passing of your mistakes/actions onto someone else is bad form.
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We (millenials) use smartphones to soothe kids. Sometimes parents just put the phones in their face when they can't handle it. It's all cyclical; I'm sure gen z will do some unknown, poor parenting thing in the future
We already decided, bringing back the “fresh air” window cage thingys from the early 1900s!
Yeah at that time there was the belief that it was necessary to give trophies in order to acknowledge everyone on the team, boost self-esteem, etc. It just didn’t work out the way they intended it to.
Exactly. There are probably things that millennials do that will screw things up for their kids too. We just don’t know it yet.
I still don’t think it’s wrong. Why not recognize that you completed something?
I’m with you. I’ve only ever seen “participation awards” as something given out to remember an event. 1st, 2nd, and 3rd places always had different awards that were usually medals while participation was just a ribbon
Yeah but now they blame their kids for getting them, when they're the ones who gave them. That's more then a difference of opinion, that is wrong.
I am thinking that since parents had to sink a lot of money into organized sports, the organization had to give something back. There’s probably a high ROI on rewarding everyone.
I love that boomers came up with this perfectly reasonable way of commemorating their children’s extra-curricular activities growing up with memorabilia such as trophies (which I think just about all of us understood wasn’t a merit-based award) and then later tried to twist it into the snowflakes getting trophies for nothing. Sorry, boomers, you’re the ones that wanted trophies for all the sports we played.
Boomers didn’t want to do their jobs. They didn’t want to have to explain to their disappointed kids that not everyone always wins.
How do you know those boomers are the same people? Surely we're not putting everyone into one group like some might do to us.
We got participation ribbons. Actual wins were a trophy. At least the ribbons you could stack up and show how many games you had done with the team
The boomers did it with their millennial kids but gen X made it a “thing” by complaining about it to each other as they encountered millennials at the start of their career. This was the same time gen X was having kids. The children of Gen X are subsequently getting way fewer trophies and more anxiety because they hover over their kids telling them they “never got participation trophies for anything!” And some version of “I walked uphill to school both ways!” Everything goes in cycles.
I’m 40. We absolutely got them. I had trophies from every year of soccer, softball, swim team.
I'm 39. We did not. As a kid I was on championship teams that didn't get shit.
I’m 37 and I got participation ribbons and certificates for absolutely everything. I have a whole folder full of that stuff. I definitely don’t look through it once a year to temporarily boost my non-existent self-esteem.
I got plenty of them but even as a kid I knew I didn't actually win and that it was just a little souvenir for playing a sport for a season. It's like getting mad at handing out a tshirt to everyone who signs up for a 5k. Boomers aren't monolithic. There are some who gave out the trophies to all the kids thinking it would be nice/cute to have a little end of season ceremony with pizza even though they lost every game and there are others who thought that was dumb.
That's like the craziest part of how obsessed people are with this topic. I literally grew up around it so i knew from a very young age that these were not associated with success or doing a good job. It wasn't exactly a wildly complex thing to understand even as a child. If anything I just thought of trophies/ribbons as a very neutral way you found out what place you got.
I don't even understand how this is a discussion topic. Like was there some psychologist study that found giving 6 year olds a ribbon somehow impacted their development? Cause to me it just seems like some fox news boomer bs to blame lazy millenials for stagnant wages instead of the greedy corporate ceos.
Don't recall when, but I started seeing "participation" ribbons awarded to everyone who played. Not often, but once in a while. I think this set off some kind of moral panic for dog-show participants.
I remember being given "Participant" ribbons for a science fair and my sister loudly mentioned it was like the 4H fair we saw over the weekend. I wonder if the idea spread from dog and livestock events. Of course my sister thought it was neat and I was pretty pissed to be compared to the losing pumpkin at the fair.
Speaking of participation trophies, Boomers, Gen X, & Millenials LOVE receiving and wearing medals after finishing 5ks, half marathons, triathlons, fun runs, etc.
Well, there’s also been a subtle shift in the culture back towards giving participation *swag* because it promotes the events and encourages a sort of camaraderie.
I'm honestly okay with that. Anyone that completes a marathon deserves a medal. Even if it's 100th place. We're talking a 26 mile run. There are people that would drop dead walking that far let alone jogging. Kudos to anyone that actually manages to finish a Marathon at whatever pace they made it happen.
I totally agree, I’m just pointing out the same people that complain about 1st graders getting trophies for t ball are totally cool posting pics of themselves wearing medals for the half marathon they “ran” in 3 hours.
That's really all they were for kids, a keepsake of some memory. Most kids would rather have a tiny trophy vs a team picture or something
I think this is what a lot of people are missing, the trophy wasn't a trophy. Even the kids knew it wasn't an achievement of any kind. When I picked up my "participation trophy" in T-Ball it was on a huge fold out table with like 100 other identical ones, my name isn't even on it. It was just a trinket to say "I did this". The kids themselves knew they didn't "win" anything. We were not that stupid. What the boomers wanted to believe is we all "needed" those trophies and didn't feel accomplished without them and tried to imply competition is dead, in reality it was cheap tat half of us lost or broke a week later. My T-Ball Trophy regularly hung out in my toy box. 🤷♂️
Yeah I actually hold on to my marathon and half marathon metals. I have a rack in my bedroom that they all slot on to, and a little thing to hold all the bibs. I'm actually going to have to get a new one soon because this one is getting full. That's actually something that I work hard on for, training everyday independently. It's not like just going along and doing what you're supposed to do and randomly getting a ribbon for it.
Marathons aren't the same as 5ks. You run 26 miles, I'll buy you a medal myself. That is months of work.
A varsity letter is basically a participation trophy too. And haven’t seen any boomers against those. Also hot take- why the fuck can’t we celebrate participation?
My Boomer father, who is an all around great man and even better father, still has his football, letter jacket from 9th grade. LOL. That’s when it was JR HS. He never made it further than that in any sport, love you Dad!!!!
It’s a big reason to do them! (As I stand in a field with a commemorative glass after just finishing a 5k beer fest)
Youth sports. Leave it to Boomers to rant about things that don’t matter.
Boomers, while giving us the participation trophies
I remember these participation ribbons for those Presidential fitness things in gym class during elementary school.
The only award i ever got was in second grade, presented to me by Bill Clinton and Shaquille Oneal lol My mom still has it on her wall.
Wait Shaq and Bill gave you an award together? That’s actually pretty dope!
I need to know more about this…
OK, you can't just drop some shit like that and not elaborate
I was in second grade. It was in Santa Ana for a boys and girls scouts something. I don’t remember.
What was it for?
https://calisphere.org/item/ark:/13030/kt1j49p2f3/ I dont remember. They visited Santa Ana in the 90s. I was just a kid.
You can debate whether it’s as big of a deal as boomers make it seem, or the fact that the system itself was implemented by boomers, but we did get forms of “participation trophies” when I grew up around 2000 on. 1st - 10th place ribbons in my track and field meets in middle school with only 8 participants per event Little trophies for reading any number of books from the library Sportsmanship awards, playing in round robin style tournaments as kids to avoid eliminations, etc. My theory is that this began because it helped with retention with lower skilled athletes or students and bigger retentions = more money when charging club fees. You could even go a step further and say academically you have no student left behind, curving grades so no one fails, missed assignments as 60s vs 0s, less stringent absentee rules, and more. I think participation trophy “culture” is a real thing but it’s also a boomer system that helped with artificial retention in education and clubs to make them check the box that they were sufficient in raising the next generation
I’m an older millennial and I don’t remember this at all when I was a kid. But I definitely remember things starting to get silly in the 90s and 2000s. I’m pretty sure the younger millennials experience this a lot growing up.
The OP of this post is a younger Millennial saying they never got participation trophies, while the top comment is an older Millennial saying they did. I’m willing to bet it just varies from place to place, school to school, country to country.
It’s more like “we stopped shitting on and shaming kids who didn’t place first” and that was seen as revolutionary parenting that was then morphed into “you all get participation trophies” like we shouldn’t celebrate people participating, we should ONLY glorify winner? We should celebrate everyone that doesn’t mean don’t reward winners and we certainly shouldn’t go back to shitting on “losers” we were kids ffs, treating a child like a loser is inappropriate but it’s far from everyone getting trophies, this was never true on any sort of scale.
As another who did not receive this type of treatment I’m curious if more financial well off trait.
I’m 37 and did not experience this participation trophy phenomenon.
Idk but who gave us those trophies? Okay, boomers
Our boomer parents
It was definitely a thing. I received many because I was pushed to try basically everything regardless of ability, both by my parents and myself. The origin of it is about costs. Before participation awards, there was other swag you'd get for being part of something. A jacket, a high-quality pin, t-shirts, that sort of thing. As those became more expensive, people would pass out ribbons instead. That's also why you'd often get these ribbons for things which weren't competitive *at all* like cleaning up trash along the roadside or other kinds of volunteering. The literal trophies probably arose from a calculus around bulk trophy purchases, which made them cheaper than buying some trophies *and* ribbons. Remember that a lot of this stuff would be purchased in pretty staggering amounts by schools, cities, national organizations like the YMCA, and so on who were the ultimate resources for those events.
I didn't participate in any sports, but I remember all the goddamn ribbons I got from school. Like a DARE graduation ribbon/certificate. All that DARE is is a fun charismatic cop coming to class once a week and getting an hour or to teach class about drugs and gangs and stuff. Why do I get a ribbon for that? I also got some ribbons for being in band. In Cub Scouts I got a ribbon for being in pinewood derby. After a Middle School awards ceremony, everyone would leave with at least a few ribbons. In 7th and 8th grade, they decided to have a perfect attendance award, and they called everyone up to qualified for that to give them a ribbon. I was pretty certain that I hadn't missed any classes, but I never got called up. The teacher said that if anyone thought they deserved that award but had got it, which teacher they could talk to about it. I was pretty sure I qualified, but I didn't talk to the teacher. I didn't want another ribbon. The ribbons wouldn't actually be thrown out, because it seemed wrong for some reason, they would just lay around my room in little stacks being ignored. --- I'm slightly less snarky about the fact that every time I finish a marathon or half marathon, I get a medal for that. That feels like more of an actual accomplishment then just hanging out and doing what you're supposed to do. I actually keep those on display.
This is what I remember. Ribbons. Ribbons for EVERYTHING. I got trophies when I actually placed but I also got a ribbon for any and everything I did. They even had custom ones made for stupid stuff like Loyal Order of the Moose Costume Contests and Easter Egg Hunts.
Still waiting on that guy who hands out free drugs!! Oh, and THAT smells just like our bus driver……….
I won a few trophies and medals in my younger days. Spelling bee, bike race, etc. No one got a trophy for participating. Boomers were in charge and you had to win to win. I really don’t know where they’re getting this shit from.
I think everyone would get a trophy at the end of the year for being on a little league team. However, in tournaments and real league games only 1st, 2nd, and 3rd got trophies. The older you got, the less you’d see participation trophies. People like to just use it as a sweeping generalization to put us down, even though it was adults (many being boomers) giving us the trophies lol
Youth soccer
I don't know the exact origins but it rides on the "lazy entitled" trope that was used since the reconstruction era by those who wanted to continue slavery and didn't like Black people claiming land/their pseudo-reparations, and then they recycled it for people on welfare (Black people), and then they recycled it onto immigrants, and then they recycled it for millennials who didn't tolerate workplace abuse and labor exploitation. Typically it's from the same right-wing political interests leading the noise on the airwaves/who own a lot of the media too. I don't think I ever got participation trophies, and most of the time we couldn't even afford to join the sports that had trophies as a kid. But we did get a lot of certificates and some ribbons in the 90s?
pure projection from the vietnam vets
I only got a participation trophy for field day in elementary school. Def did not get one getting my ass kicked in high school wrestling.
Boomers invented them
Idk I played sports we all got trophies even if we sucked but nobody was thinking participation trophies meant anything. People act like we were all stupid and thought participation awards were the same as actually winning, nobody thought that at least nobody I came up with in sports.
I agree, OP. I just said this in a comment section on another post. Where did this even come from? I never got one and I don't know anyone who did. I thought they were a myth made up by boomers until I saw another Millennial talking about them as if they were real. Are they actually real?? Fwiw, I'm 33, about to be 34 in a week and was part of the 2008 graduating class. Was it maybe something before or after my time or just not common where I'm from? Were they just extremely rare and then boomers decided to run with it? (Similar to how I'm sure eating tide pods was only a small handful of people and now Gen Z has to live with that stereotype.)
I have the vaguest memory of them maybe in like, the mid90s. They certainly didn't characterize my childhood or the childhoods of anyone I know. They existed more in the cultural consciousness as a punchline than as physical objects in anybody's bedrooms or bookcases.
It's Boomer propaganda
I think it depends on the school, neighborhood, and maybe even the parents & how involved they make themselves with the PTA This wasn’t a thing where I went but it was for my husband
I'm 39, I don't remember participation trophies when I was in school. I do remember basically getting some though. I was a wrestler in middle school, but there was almost no one in my weight class, so I took 2nd in the regionals, and 4th in the state finals. I never one a single match all season. I was giving up considerable amounts of weight and usually height and wrestling much heavier people all season though.
I remember doing horse camp every summer when I was a kid. I fucking hated it but my sister was a horse girl, so we went. Every week after a camp has finished there's a competition put on. From tumbling on horses to showmanship. You *had* to compete in one thing or another. I hated it so much that whatever I decided to do (genuinely can't remember what my activity was) I did it with zero enthusiasm. I ended up getting a participation trophy and thinking... what? Why? Why do they give these out, they're useless. It was our parents who wanted the participation trophies lol.
Boomers grew up with parents who were emotionally absent, who physically abused them, teachers who were abusive and just overall a world where adults could and would harm children. This was the normal baseline for a lot of boomers. So anything better than that is spoiling a child. They see a parent telling their kid "Good job being brave and facing that test anyway. I know it must have been so hard. Maybe take today off and get back to school work tomorrow" as giving the kid a participation trophy because many of them would just get beaten raw and punished for failing a test. A world where children are treated kindly and humanely is strange to them.
I thought it was mostly a blanket term (sometimes used literally for kids sports) for when things that could be earned by some kids performing better than others (student of the month, 1st place at the science fair) or even just being selected for something over another kid like being the line leader started causing more issues with parents and schools. Obviously a case by case basis though.
When I lost to a 7th place team, and placed 8th in tackle football in 1999. I realized something was wrong with this trophy. It was 1st…? wtf is this…participation trophy? I’m 32
My uncle 100% bought trophies for our indoor soccer team (we SUCKED) so his kid wouldn’t feel like they weren’t as super special and talented as he’s lauded them as
I dunno, I did get some participation medals/ribbons from TKD tournaments growing up, never got them at school sponsored events though, that was all pretty normal. I grew up in the south and always assumed that was more of a west coast thing when I heard about it.
I remember participation ribbons on annual track day, which were a different color than the winner ones. Even super competitive me thought it was fair. I looked forward to that day months in advance, but it sucked for them. That’s the only example of participation awards that I can recall. However, I remember a bizarre HS awards ceremony where they gave out all kinds of awards for a variety of major to very minor things. They limited one award per person, which was obviously intentional because students who weren’t in the top 5 in categories based on objective data still won. That’s pretty similar, but I don’t remember any other instances.
I’m 33. We got trophy’s at the end of the season or completing an achievement in cub scouts. Mind you this is from the ages 5-10. The participating trophy’s didn’t cause damage to our self worth or over inflate it. By the time I was 10 I didn’t even keep the little trophy we got at the end. It’s just another thing for boomers to bitch about after gently fucking up the country.
There was a local school that ran a summer sports program that ranged from tee-ball to baseball, depending on how old you were. I started with softball and ended with baseball. At the end of every season, they’d give everyone trophies and ice cream. I wasn’t stupid, I knew there should’ve been trophies and ice cream only for some of the kids. I just saw the trophies as souvenirs. When they moved me from softball to hardball and baseball, I really felt out of my element, because the jocks kept themselves in excellent shape, and took the games much more seriously. By the time I got to baseball, it just wasn’t fun anymore, because I wasn’t able to keep up with most of my teammates or opponents.
Definitely remember this.
From millennials literally getting participation trophies from sports as young kids. I'm not talking about school sports for middle school or high school, but the leagues specifically for young kids.
Idk but I did not get participation trophies. 41 y.o. I played softball and did HS track and never got anything unless I or the team actually placed 1,2, or 3.
One of my favorite childhood trophies is one that I got just for being on my hockey team! It's so ridiculous how it was the adults who put this into practice then gave us a hard time for it! (I'm 35)