Boo Hoo

As a kid, Halloween was one of my favorite holidays… until we moved to the country when I was seven and there were no doors within walking distance. Then Halloween was just my brother’s birthday. (Happy 56th today, Mike!).

When our children were little, it was an annual treat to take them around our neighborhood and go to ‘only houses with lights on of people we know.’ That ended last year. When I asked our 13-year-old this weekend what she was wearing, she said, “I want to stay home and hand out candy.” Guess my next opportunity to celebrate this fun occasion is with grandkids, whichever decade that might be.

Some folks at our church don’t allow their young kids to trick-or-treat. After all, they say, it’s a holiday rooted in darkness, filled with satanic undertones, totally pagan. Perhaps. Maybe. OK. However, I don’t think little Johnny or Susie – age six – think wearing a Lightning McQueen or Angry Bird costume this year has anything to do with celebrating the devil. (Although they might get scared if someone dressed as a presidential candidate walks past them on the sidewalk.)

To me this is more of the same ‘everybody gets a trophy’ mentality that is pervasive in our society. ‘Lexi played soccer, and at the party afterward our wonderful coach gave everyone a medal and said each one was the team’s MVP, and Jen, the soccer mom, got a trophy for all the kids, and Tom, Adam’s father, made goals for everyone to practice in the off-season.’ Wow! Imagine if these eight-year-olds had actually won a game.

It’s a big world. Most of it is good. Part of it is bad. There are Buzz Lightyears who want to save mankind… and Big Bad Wolves that want to devour it. Your role as parents isn’t to shield your children. It’s to teach them the difference between good and bad – and to protect them until they’re old enough to make their own decisions. Sheltering doesn’t help them learn. Teaching everybody wins isn’t dealing in reality. Those acts – done mostly to hide from your own fears of what might happen – simply delay the inevitable until young adults are unprepared to deal with what they encounter in daylight and darkness.

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Step Right Up

I played youth baseball for five seasons…and our record always seemed to be 8-8. My team lost the league finals in eighth grade basketball. Through all my years of competitive sports as a kid the only trophies I ever won were in Putt-Putt tournaments, where I had an adept skill of hitting the ball exactly where needed on the orange metal sideboards.

One of my awakenings as a parent was learning this is an ‘Every child gets a trophy’ and “Everybody’s a winner’ world. There is a box in our attic of more than 40 trophies ‘earned’ by our kids. The fact is not one is for winning a championship. Instead, they are for participation – acknowledgment that attending practices and showing up for games is somehow worthy of recognition.

There is a new law on the books here in Texas that a school district “may not require a classroom teacher to assign a minimum grade for an assignment.” Why was it necessary for our leaders to enact this legislation? Seems many districts had policies that set 50 as the lowest grade a student could receive, even if they failed to turn in an assignment or made 30 on an exam. Perhaps those in charge of education are recognizing that the by-product of No Child Left Behind Without A Trophy could be a generation without accountability. One that assumes everything always works out in the end, because they always reward me for just showing up.

I coached my son’s basketball team for six seasons, and the last two we lost the championship game. Some kids cried afterwards, saddened by coming up short for the second straight year. I didn’t know what to say. If I had it to do all over, here’s what I would tell them: “I’m proud of you for growing as a team each week. You listened, practiced hard and are a lot better than you were three months ago. You aren’t always going to win. That’s not how life is. Learn from this, and make changes that make you better.” That lesson would serve them better than some trophy that eventually ends up stored in the attic.

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