Losing Is Good for You - Literature review Example

After several years studying, Po Bronson and Merryman found out that awards can be motivational to children but “nonstop recognition will cause them to underachieve”. In addition, Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University, found out that children like to hear praises but when they experienced failure, “they’d rather cheat than risk failing again.” Bradley Morris and Shannon Zentall found out in their experiment that children who heard praise tend to focus on their mistakes afterwards.

Children can clearly distinguish between excellent work and poor work by age 4 or 5 and they give up because of knowing the fact that everyone will get rewarded but not due to their outperformance. Actually, kids enjoy the competition. But if there are no difficulties and distinctions, there will be no motivation for them. Merryman says that if she was a baseball coach, she will only have three awards and give them a list which will guide them to achieve the awards. Moreover, she argues that when we punish children, “we must consider their individual levels of cognitive and emotional development.

” But when it comes to rewarding, treat everyone differently is appropriate and will bring a positive effect to the children. She also mentioned how a parent was angry when some league announced there will be no trophy be given out. Her anger came up because she knows that children value those trophies and will do anything to win them. Jean Twenge found that college students who have numbers of participation trophies think they only need to show up to achieve success. She said that failure is very common and children should learn this.

Merryman concludes that we should teach children how to deal with failure and get rid of trophies since it is their right to lose (Merryman, 2013).