WALTER784 said:

Now that you mention it... YES... it delegitimizes the help those truly in need require causing more devastation in the path! The exact opposite of what should be!

The invisible hand of unintended consequences.

Showtalk said:

Children should take responsibility for their actions and the consequences or they never learn. Same thing with debt.

Many of them are by design, insulated from that kind of responsibility. Then when they turn 18, the bubble wrap is removed, and society somehow believes they magically transition on that birthday to be able to now function without those "training wheels". And then the adults who gave participation trophies and such and made generations of kids afraid of their own shadow, are surprised when they have a whole decade or more delay before they can hit any of the traditional milestones of adulthood.

$1,661.87 in cats (ROCKETMAN_S) said...

The invisible hand of unintended consequences.

Unintended or purposefully planned?

FWIW

We always hated those trophies. I remember a young soccer team coming to me and asking why they all got trophies when their team lost every game.  It was ridiculous.

WALTER784 said:

Unintended or purposefully planned?

Purposefully planned would be far less frightening, actually.

But I fear that rather than the Illuminati and the TriLateralists planning purposefully, instead it's Homer Simpson pushing buttons without a clue. Or worse, there is no one steering these things at all, and we're all just along for the ride.

Fortunately, some of those kids became successful adults in spite of all the efforts to set them up to fail.

Unfortunately, the fraction of those is much smaller than those who managed to succeed back when I was a kid, and was encouraged to excel and explore the world and occasionally fall down and skin our knees.

Most kids were able to put that nonsense behind them and get into real world situations as they got older.  Childrens’ sports are fleeting pastimes anyway. A small fraction are able to play in high school and that number drops even more in college and then in the pros.  So it becomes unimportant as they age out of trophy soccer. They don’t do that in high school sports.

Showtalk said:

Most kids were able to put that nonsense behind them and get into real world situations as they got older.

Except for that handful of every generation who peaked in high school. Even out of a graduating class of only 165 or so, there were a few for whom high school was their lifetime high water mark in life.

A bunch of them played football and still relive their glory days decades later.

Like the character Al Bundy from the old sitcom "Married with Children". He was a high school football hero who had ended up a shoe salesman in the mall, with a wife that is a free-spender, a son that is an under-achiever, and a slutty teenage daughter. Classic dysfunctional family - I think the series pre-dates The SImpsons, probably had some overlap.