TL;DR: Awards are not evil, and most teachers mean well, but when recognition becomes a scarce, ranked, public currency, children learn to chase approval first and purpose later, and that trade-off shows up years down the road as anxiety, passivity, and an inability to self-direct once the system stops handing out rubrics.
Every year, schools hand out awards. On paper, it’s harmless, even wholesome. We are recognising good character, celebrating effort, rewarding excellence. We are motivating children.
But if you zoom out for a second and stop thinking like an adult who already has a stable identity, which arguably many adults don’t, and you think like a child who is still building theirs, you will notice that awards don’t just recognize children, they condition them.
And the conditioning is rarely about “good values” or “excellence” in the abstract; the conditioning is far more primal and simple: the world approves of you when you are chosen, and you should learn how to become choosable.
The first thing awards teach is not character — it’s calibration
When recognition is scarce, ranked, and publicly distributed, kids quickly learn what the real game is, because kids are exceptionally good at pattern recognition when their social survival depends on it.
They learn which behaviours get rewarded, which answers are “safe”, which teachers like which kind of student, what a “good student” looks like, what a “good leader” sounds like, how to appear hardworking, how to appear humble, how to appear kind in a way that is pleasing to adults, and how to avoid the messy behaviours that are normal for learning, like asking “stupid” questions, taking weird risks, or trying something and failing in public.
In other words, they learn how to calibrate.
And calibration is useful, to a point. Every society needs a baseline of manners and cooperation. But there is a cost when calibration becomes the main motivational fuel, because the child stops asking “What do I want to build?” and starts asking “What gets me approved?” and once that neurological pathway forms, it doesn’t magically disappear when they turn eighteen.
The quiet damage: you can produce high performers who don’t know how to self-direct
This is the part that people only see later, when the student becomes an adult and the world no longer gives out neat scoreboards.
School is an environment where the next step is always defined: the next test, the next exam, the next CCA milestone, the next scholarship, the next award. Even if a student is stressed, they at least know what “success” is supposed to look like next week.
Then graduation happens, and suddenly the guardrails disappear.
No one hands you a rubric for adulthood. No one awards you a certificate for doing difficult things consistently. No one claps because you had a hard conversation, or learned a new skill quietly, or rebuilt your health after a bad year, or took a risk that didn’t work out but taught you something real.
And that’s when the motivational structure collapses for some people — because they were trained for a world where the “why” is outsourced to an institution, and the “what next” is always given.
If you spend fifteen years teaching someone, implicitly, that the best move is to follow instructions and optimise for approval, you shouldn’t be surprised when they hesitate in environments where there is no senior figure to approve of them.
In the workplace, people mistakenly think their bosses or managers will know the exact answer, but they forget that they are hired to solve problems, figure solutions on their own and propose the best course of action.
My own experience: not being chosen forced me to build an internal compass
I don’t remember being the kid who collected those awards, especially not the ones that mattered socially when you’re young and still deciding what you are. My teacher even told my mother I would have been made a prefect if I wasn’t so talkative at Primary 4.
I noticed it early, and I think at some point I made a quiet peace with it: I wasn’t going to be socially accepted in the exact way my teachers expected a good student to be, and if I kept chasing that, I would spend my whole life trying to become a version of myself that was acceptable to other people, instead of becoming true to my own inclinations. That would make me miserable.
So I started finding validation elsewhere — part-time jobs, practical skills, self-learning — and eventually I stopped needing validation entirely in the way most young adults expect. I managed to build a sense of what I valued, what I was curious about, and what kind of person I wanted to become regardless of whether anyone gave a approving comment.
That internal compass did two things for me.
First, it made me productive in a way that wasn’t dependent on praise. I could work, learn, try, fail, and repeat without needing external reward to keep the engine running, which later became extremely useful when building businesses, because entrepreneurship is basically long stretches of doing unglamorous work with no guarantee it will pay off.
Second — and this is the part I didn’t appreciate until much later — it made me oddly oblivious to criticism, not because I’m incapable of taking feedback, but because when you have a strong sense of what you value, criticism stops feeling like a verdict and starts feeling like data, and data is something you can consider, filter, and apply without letting it rewrite your identity.
Because I am not approval seeking from a young age, I could also discount the earnest advice given by elders to focus on my study, or to aim for traditionally successful jobs and figure out my own journey.
That is a useful defence against approval-seeking, because approval-seeking people don’t process criticism as information; they process it as danger. If you want to build anything meaningful in the real world, you cannot afford to treat every opinion like a threat, because you will drown. In fact, most people have opinions, but most people are not builders, so it’s important to adjust the weight of people’s opinions based on their own accomplishments.
Even “character awards” can become performance if we aren’t careful
This might be the most uncomfortable part to say, but it needs to be said: even when schools award “character”, the student can learn the wrong lesson. Because if character becomes something you win, then character becomes something you perform.
The child learns, “How do I look like I have integrity?” instead of “How do I act with integrity when it costs me something?” and those are two completely different things. One creates optics. The other creates a spine.
It might sound harsh, but it’s only harsh because we are used to treating “awards” as automatically virtuous, when in reality, awards are just tools, and tools create whatever behaviour the system rewards.
So what do we do — cancel awards?
No. That’s not realistic, and I don’t even think that’s the main point.
The point is to stop making awards the centre of a child’s motivational world, and to stop pretending that a child’s long-term psychological wiring is unaffected by a decade of being ranked, compared, and publicly selected. For me, I tell my children that if you receive awards, treat them as good to have, but never aim for them, and never let your identity be shaped by them.
If you’re a parent or teacher, the simplest shift is this: stop asking questions that point outward, and start asking questions that point inward.
Instead of:
- “Did you get chosen?”
- “Are you top X%?”
- “Did the teacher praise you?”
- “Did you win?”
Ask:
- “What interested you today, even if it won’t be tested?”
- “What was hard, and what did you try anyway?”
- “What do you want to explore next?”
When you consistently ask inward questions, you teach the child that their inner world matters, that curiosity is valuable even without applause, and that purpose is something you build, not something you receive.
And if you still want to recognise students — because recognition can be encouraging when done right — then recognise things that don’t create an approval addiction: progress, consistency, initiative, contribution, honesty, courage, and the ability to keep going when nobody is watching.
Because the goal isn’t to raise children who are good at being evaluated.
The goal is to raise adults who can self-direct, solve problems, and build lives that make sense to them even when there is no stage, no certificate, and no audience.
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