[oneiftwo]

>Getting a stupid ribbon in third grade is not going to radically inform your approach to life.

It's not a single stupid ribbon. It's growing up in a society where literally every competition results in everyone winning. Predicting performance (i.e. evaluating merit) is a skill that requires development, yet when you reward everyone equally regardless of success or failure you train that skill on noise. How do you expect children to learn to recognize when people are or are not skilled when you imply that skills don't matter because everyone wins anyway? Instead you raise them to believe that skills don't matter.

What happens when these children become adults after a lifetime of being taught that everyone is a winner, regardless of performance? Cognitive dissonance and a sense of entitlement, because there will always be true winners and losers in a world of scarce resources.

Children need to experience failure. Just like they need to experience pain and a multitude of other negative emotions that our modern society increasingly attempts to shield them from. Otherwise you raise a generation of childminded adults who fail to differentiate between charisma and merit, and all of society suffers.

[gdulli]

Maybe what the other commenter is getting at is that there's no criticism of society you couldn't find some way to project onto some act of parenting or other.

But drawing a line from your pet peeve about the world to one occasional event out of thousands in a kid's life is disproportionate and reductive.

Children fail and children fail to get their way all the time, in hundreds of daily struggles. A few school contests they don't even necessarily find important shouldn't be assumed to move the needle. If a kid grows up rich, that's something that colors their every experience and is more likely to shape a lifelong attitude about what they're entitled to. But that still doesn't mean you have to stereotype them.

[aspenmayer]

Maybe the failure that is being taught to children is the failure of external sources of validation. The sooner a child learns which external sources of validation have merit or value, and which are gamed or captured, the sooner that child learns to trust in their own process over an external authority. I think that is a positive outcome in education.