3 Life Lessons Kids Today Need to Learn From Kids of the Past

Life was not so much harder when we were young but it was challenging. And that made it more satisfying. Here are a few truths that kids today could really benefit by learning. 

Life doesn’t always give you a trophy for showing up

Organized youth sports reward kids for participation — attending practices and being part of a team. In other words, everyone gets a trophy. The practice dates back to the 1920s, according to The Sport Journal, when sports teams needed players and offered the promise of a trophy for everyone as a recruitment tool. Sometime in the late 1990s, the reasons for giving out trophies to everyone shifted to being a reward for honoring a commitment and being a good team member.

As the parent of two athletic kids, I never bought it. I always felt my children — who were the ones scoring the goals, hitting the home runs and making the baskets — were being short-changed when it came to recognition for their competitiveness and actual sports skills.

Don’t get me wrong: No child should be made to feel bad about themselves, but what’s wrong with figuring out what you are good at and accepting that nobody is good at everything?

Besides, participation trophies just don’t cut it in adult life. The boss isn’t going to shout “good try” when you blow a big deal. We live in a society where we measure results, not effort — and unless that changes, kids need to learn this lesson.

Let the lightning bugs go

As a child in the 1950s, I joined the nightly neighborhood hunt for fireflies. On summer nights, we would gather — Mason jars in hand, with holes we punched in the tops so our prisoners could breathe — on our stoops waiting for the lightning bugs to appear. Slow-moving, they were easy to catch. And each night, my mother would admonish me to release them before coming inside to bed. I only forgot once and was sufficiently horrified by the genocide I found in the morning knowing that it had occurred by my hand.