It must be great to be a kid nowadays. In their world, each and every person is a winner. There are no losers. Not in athletics. Not in schools.

No longer do kids lose ballgames. In many leagues the score is not disclosed or the kids are told they tied the game. It makes them feel good about sports, not knowing they were brutally beaten or made a half-dozen boneheaded errors in the field.

These same kids never truly fail in school, either. Outright "zeros" aren’t allowed in many districts, so teachers are forced into inflating averages by the doling out of 50’s as the absolute minimum. The standard for failing grade levels has dropped over the years, too, from 65 to 55 (note we are heading back to 65, though extremely dumbed-down). Perhaps it makes kids feel good about school, knowing they can succeed with whatever level of effort they want to apply.

To some modern-day parents and a few liberal-minded souls this sounds good, but, it’s about the worst thing that could happen. It’s glorified child abuse. In the drive to be "kinder and gentler" our schools, coaches, and parents have all tried to lessen the supposedly hurtful emotional impact of losses, failure, and bad behavior to the point that we have created a distorted reality in the minds of kids everywhere: They cannot tell failure apart from success.

They have been coddled to the point that they can’t learn from their mistakes, because mistakes no longer have any bearing upon them. Traditionally, failure has always been the greatest teacher because experience dictates which path you should never choose again or which one worked best. By taking that out of the equation as our society has, few kids can thusly develop the drive to make themselves better because they perceive minimal effort and minimal success to be wonderful as they are reaping the very same rewards that the cream of the crop are.

Such softness yields complacency and vice versa. This complacency will only create a lifetime of dependency; dependency on parents, dependency on the government. This need for a crutch will not cut it in our society, and crippling failure will occur, haunting them and us when these kids finally do get out into the Real World.

They will be unable to handle the stresses of reality. It is fraught with painful learning experiences in careers, money, love, and health. Since we have made consequences and repercussions a thing of the past to them, these youth upon becoming adults will be ill-prepared mentally and emotionally to handle these shocking moments. Who knows what can happen to a weak, ill-prepared mind when the going gets really rough. Once they actually do fail and are completely unprepared to handle or learn from it, they will bring down their employers, coworkers, and families.

It’s time that we as the parents, teachers and leaders of today, stopped going down this dark path and re-learned the basic premise that losing IS an option. By coddling our youth as we do - even right through teenhood – we’ve made them fragile babies, sheltering them from the harsh reality of failure and the necessary learning tool that it is. We must toss away that safety net, and let these kids get hurt. They will be better for it.