"All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books."
-Thomas Carlyle

by Anastasia P. Lytle

Parents are supposed to protect their children. So, in a way, are teachers. We are supposed to teach our children how to be good people, how to be successful, and how to make it in the world. We are also here, of course, to protect our children and to shelter them from harm. But what happens when we shelter our children too much? Is such a thing possible?

Look at some of the contradictions going on in our society. Education, learning, and actual facts are being pushed aside in our schools to make room for the "multicultural, sensitive whole child." And political correctness is beginning to have an alarming say in what our children can say and do in schools. In the name of "self esteem," many programs and unimportant little factors such as grades are being eliminated or watered down so as not to make people feel "bad about themselves." In our public schools, supported by the average taxpayer, our children have condoms pushed on them at a young age, encouraged to explore their feelings, and told that there's nothing wrong with having an abortion or experimenting with sex. Yet these same schools outlaw dodge ball because it is "humiliating" and might impact our children negatively. Let me get this straight — a ball can hurt them, but having sex at thirteen can't? So games such as Dodge ball, Red Rover, and even Duck-Duck-Goose ¹ are vanishing from the playground, labeled as being humiliating, cruel, and worst of all, potentially damaging to a child's self esteem.

Terry McCauley, Physical Education Coordinator of Montgomery County, Md., stated that the dodge ball game with it's emphasis on using other players as targets to be knocked off one by one, does not fit with the school curriculum, designed to promote a child's social, emotional, and physical growth.²

And as Northwest Education Magazine points out, "Many baby boomers vividly remember the hurt and mortification they endured in punishing games like dodge ball and team sports that pitted athletic kids against clumsy ones, aggressive against timid. And then there was the cruel practice of choosing up sides. Countless children were deeply wounded when team captains passed them over again and again in favor of their more agile peers." ³ Okay, so they weren't picked first. My question is: were these baby boomers as deeply wounded when they didn't get into the first college they applied to, or didn't get that first job that they interviewed for, or didn't get the very first promotion? Everyone can't be good at everything, and the response should be "go find something at which you are good," not "I feel bad, so let's eliminate everything that doesn't make me live happily ever after."

Life isn't about feeling "good." Everything in life has ups and downs. Marriage had a lot of happy moments and a lot of really sad and/or depressing moments. Does that mean people shouldn't get married? Having children is possibly the most emotional thing that anyone can do. If you have a child that you adore, and he turns out to be a rapist or a druggie, should you kill him so that you won't have to feel sad about his issues? Of course not! There is no guarantee that anything in life will work out the way that we want. How, you ask, does this relate to children's games? We learn lessons throughout life, and if you always get knocked down in Red Rover, you either toughen up or accept that there are some things at which you are not good, or you mentally collapse. But then when you ask out someone and get turned down, it's a little bit less crushing than it would have been if you'd never been exposed to failure and ineptitude before. And yet many children's soccer teams have even stopped keeping score, on the basis that winning and losing are relative terms, and children shouldn't be made to feel like losers. Wait, so we should tell our kids that they are always winners, even when they totally screw something up? At what point is it okay to tell our kids that they could have done better?

However, the modern idea seems to be that if we eliminate everything, not just games, that could make our children feel "bad," that they will be well adjusted people who will be able to face the world and accomplish anything they want due to their extreme self-confidence. Right? So we should take out everything that could make them feel bad. Well, what else besides the horribly scarring game of "Duck-Duck-Goose" made me feel bad in school? I have lots of awkward, embarrassing stories from grade school, and I have witnessed many embarrassing things that my students have done. There are times when one does not notice that one's skirt is tucked into one's underwear, or one walks into a glass door, thinking that it's open, or does something equally dumb. But we grow from these experiences, and learn to laugh at them (much later in life). Should we eliminate underwear or glass doors? Kids do stupid things, and they need to be humiliated about them. Otherwise, they'll keep being stupid. My best friend in kindergarten, Alexis, one had to be rushed to the ER because at recess she'd dropped a pebble in her ear and in fell down her ear canal and wouldn't come out. She was fairly embarrassed over that, and we teased her for weeks. But she never again put a rock in her ear to see what would happen.

One of the problems with America today is that we tell our children that they can be whatever they want to be. This is not exactly true. No matter how much we encourage our children, they have certain limitations. No matter how much I ever practiced, I could never become even a decent, much less a professional, tennis player. Even if I wanted to be good, the fact is that I am extremely uncoordinated and I just don't have the body type of a professional athlete. No matter how much some people try, they can never fully master even a second language, and some people cannot understand math, even though algebra is completely logical. People have limitations. If we teach children that they have limitations, they may realize that they can't be good at everything, but they will also be good at something.

Say that a child is picked last for teams in dodge ball, or never picked as the goose in duck duck goose, because he is fat. That child's feelings may be hurt, yes, but then we excels over his more agile classmates in grades or performance or any area, how much sweeter is his accomplishment? By making everyone "equal" and taking away personal achievement, we are destroying a child's opportunity to shine. By eliminating situations where children can feel "bad," and only promoting "self-esteem," we also don't allow children to prove themselves and to actually feel good about an accomplishment, not a warm fuzzy intangible thing. Yet according to Education Week, "Adherents have championed self-esteem as a "social vaccine" against educational failure, drug abuse, alcoholism, teenage pregnancy, crime, child abuse, and welfare dependency, among a host of other social vices. It has been called the "key to rebuilding community" and a "vision for developing our human capital to make America competitive again." ⁴

How exactly does this magical self-esteem work? Wait, I get it! Ideally, kids who feel good about themselves don't go get pregnant at fifteen, and when offered drugs, they think, "I don't need cocaine! I have positive reinforcement from my English teacher! Yay!"

Someone will have to explain to me how self-esteem is going to make America competitive again. I really don't understand. Maybe I'm just dense, but it seems to me that if you give a kid a hug and a shiny sticker every time he turns in poorly done work, and don't correct his answers, then he doesn't see the need to put in more effort. The more we reward kids for mediocrity, the less they will be challenged to do their actual best. If I can get a paycheck for sitting at home playing video games, and an equal paycheck for working a sixty hour week, chances are that I am going to be playing a whole lot of video games. Rewarding people for something commonplace or even second-best does not challenge them. Instead, it teaches them that there is no reason to try harder.

I am not saying that we should make students feel bad. I am a teacher, and go to great lengths to help my students, and have sat through hours of stories, sympathizing with a fifteen year old who is sure that her life is over because her ex boyfriend went to prom with another girl. Kids definitely need support. But they also need to grow up. I may listen to the girl who misses her ex boyfriend, but I don't go beat him up to make her feel better. Instead I say, as gently as I can, that he obviously didn't appreciate her, and that maybe she should focus on how she can improve her life and stop worrying about some boy. Telling her that all men are evil pigs and that she is safest staying away from men and love for the rest of her life would "eliminate" the problem, but it would also potentially cause many other problems. Getting rid of men would not get rid of this girl's feelings, just like getting rid of dodge ball would not make fat kids stop feeling bad about being fat.

Self-esteem is not going to go up because we tell kids that they can't play dodge ball. If anything, it will hurt the kids who might be good at dodge ball but not much else. How else are the athletic children supposed to show off what they are good at? By taking away one person's pain, we are also taking away another student's sense of pride. Our kids learn self-esteem from actually accomplishing things, not being told that they are wonderful angels for doing absolutely nothing. Instead of taking away anything that could make kids feel bad, we should instead have a support system of adults (such as teachers and parents) that can talk to kids who feel bad, have been humiliated, or are just upset. Let your kids know that this is perfectly normal, that it's part of life, and help them pick themselves up and move on, rather than seeking to destroy anything that challenges them. Kids aren't as stupid, frail, weak, and incompetent as adults assume, but they will be if they are not allowed to face and overcome challenges personally.

Life is competitive. There's just no way around that. The best and/or most capable people do the best in this world, for the most part. And hard work can take you a very long way. How many authors would be published today if they had given up after their first rejection letter? Kids learn lessons such as not giving up by participating in competitive events such as sports, tournaments, and spelling bees. People compete throughout their lives. Children compete for attention from parents, teachers, and playmates. Girls compete for boys, and boys compete for girls. Adults compete for jobs and houses and cars and accomplishments. And if we eliminate games, ideas, and issues that have elements of competition, does anyone actually believe that we can crush humanity's competitive spirit? At what point does competition vanish?

And yet our schools, and our country, is leaning more and more towards "cooperative learning" which "is based on the premise — and research evidence — that cooperation promotes higher achievement among youngsters than individualized competition, that attention to social skills and moral values does not have to come at the expense of academics, and that children are more likely to follow rules that they understand and help formulate."⁵

Okay, so all working together and not competing at all is a good way to live lives. Say three boys like one girl. Should they all work "together" to get her? Should two different people applying for the same job work "together" to get it, when only one of them can actually be given the position? At what point do children start competing and stop working "together" in everything? Say you teach a child that working for his own gain is bad, that he should always work with everyone else to make everything "happy." What is this child going to do when he's in high school, trying to run track or get good grades or debate? Should he work "together" with other people on tests and running to make everyone win? Will that help him self-esteem?

The truth is that happy, friendly, non-competitive group work doesn't really apply to real life. I work very hard with other teachers to make sure that we are doing our jobs, but we don't all sit together in the auditorium every day and try to incorporate one happy lesson involving computer science, chemistry, geography, Spanish, and geometry! And in my class, children don't learn by working "together" to discover what a word or verb tense "means to them." Learning is not subjective, and knowledge is not something that can be felt. Rather, it is something acquired. And yes, people compete. Doctors compete to get into the best hospitals, lawyers compete to get into the best firms, teachers compete to teach the best classes, and waiters compete for the best sections and shifts. And when people actually earn something, based on their own merit, then they have a right to be proud. But if they're never taught to earn what they actually deserve, and are instead told that they somehow deserve the whole world on a silver platter, the result is a group of incompetent, unskilled whiners who are astounded to find that employers actually want them to do something for that paycheck!

By taking away children's games that encourage competition, and trying to eliminate anything whatsoever that might hurt our children's precious self-esteem, we are doing great damage to these same children and are helping set them up for failure. If a child does not learn to deal with the world, stand up for himself, and actually earn respect and worth through his own actions and merit, then he will not be able to properly function in the "real world." Rather, he will forever be lost and confused, unclear as to why he doesn't get what he "deserves" and forever whining and complaining about how life is "unfair," because he doesn't understand that it's only fair to earn what you get in life. By taking away our children's right to compete and be successful, we are ensuring that they become incompetent, weak adults.

Yes, self-esteem is a good thing. But it should be esteem concerning something tangible, something real. In my classroom, I give stickers to children who make an "A" on a test or quiz, and many of my students try very, very hard for those little stickers. When they do earn one, these stickers go on lockers, cell phones, and even refrigerators. While it is a very little thing, that sense of accomplishment, symbolized by that sticker, gives each girl a sense of pride and accomplishment, because she knows that she earned that "A". Self esteem should not be something that we pour out on everyone without cause or reason. Find something that each child is actually good at and encourage him in that area. It is well documented that the United States, the world's superpower, has mediocre math and science scores. Why do you think this is? It's because our teachers and our schools and our parents are too afraid to tell our kids that they are doing badly, and instead of making our students learn, and drilling them, and actually teaching them, too many just accept poor work and lavish it with praise because they don't want the child to "feel bad."

So what should we do? We should let kids be kids. Yes, they are going to get hurt sometimes, and our first instinct as parents and teachers will be to protect them. But we can't protect them by putting them in a plastic bubble and shielding them from everything rough in the world. Bad things exist in the world, and sooner or later our kids are going to have to learn to deal with them. Talk with your kids on a situation by situation basis about what he should do in a situation, and make it clear that you love your child. No, this won't fix everything. But a child who knows that his parents love and support him is far more likely to have good "self-esteem" than a child whose parent is willing to protest duck-duck-goose as being "humiliating" but also doesn't have time to hold and love her child.

There is, of course, a balance. We shouldn't teach our children not to stand up for themselves, and never to compete, but we also shouldn't teach our children to be bullies and to beat everyone else up in order to win. We need to love our children, care for them, and teach them also how to stand on their own. This is done, sometimes, by letting our children lose at things, and then taking that experience and helping them grow through it.

1. Gehring, John. "Cooperative Learning." Teacher Magazine. February 21st, 2001. Back
2. McClain, Danielle M. "The Dodge-Ball Debate." Bella Online. http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art1772.asp. Back
3. Sherman, Lee. "A Generation of High-tech Couch Potatoes Meets a New Kind of PE." Northwest Education Magazine. Volume 6 number 1, Fall 2000. Back
4. Weisman, Jonathan. "The Apostles Of Self-Esteem." Teacher Magazine. May 1st, 1991. Back
5. "Cooperative Learning." Teacher Magazine. May 1st, 1992. Back

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