Why James Harrison is wrong: Participation trophies don't warp kids' outlook

Kids always know the score, even when it's not being kept.

Perhaps this is news to James Harrison, the Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker who wrote a recent Instagram post that said he returned his kids' "participation" trophies because they hadn't earned them. His sons, ages 8 and 6, would get real trophies when they won real championships. And, anyway, how was he to raise boys to be men when they were given trophies just for trying?

And then the world went nuts. Much of the sporting press nodded in solemn agreement, as if a football player with a history of cheap shots is now somehow a paragon of proper parenting. Jim Vance, the estimable anchor of Washington's NBC affiliate, said on air that participation trophies are tantamount to child abuse because it is a parent's responsibility to teach a child about the real world.

Others suggested millennials are singularly unable to cope these days because they grew up believing all those trophies they got for showing up warped their view of their own specialness.

This is nonsense. Kids always know the fastest kid on the playground and the best players on their teams. They know the difference between winning and losing and the distance between first place and last. They do not grow up to believe they are winners in life just because they got a tin trophy for finishing fifth in rec league basketball.

Participation trophies were not thought up by kids and they probably mean more to the self esteem of parents and grandparents than to their progeny in the pint-size cleats. Is any of this really worth another chapter in the tough-love approach to life?

This baby boomer knows lots of millennials — mostly smart, happy and well adjusted young men and women. Older generations always find something to harrumph about in younger generations, true since Stone Age rock-heads. That's all this really is, a belief that things were better in a past that never was.

The trophies cost a few bucks for a big smile. They do not cost trauma in later life. Woody Allen famously said 80% of success is showing up. Inscribe that on a participation bauble and consider this tempest in a trophy like a youth league referee:

No harm, no foul.