ABSTRACT
My elder son’s room used to be full of medals, trophies, certificates, gold stars, and other evidence that he participated in soccer, choir, school, camp, and more. Most of them were for simply showing up, framed and mounted (by me) as a continually growing shrine to his worth. When he decided to focus on music, all evidence of participation in other activities was either thrown away by him (or rescued by me). What
remains today are a few mementos that matter to him as evidence of his musical journey. My teenage son is focused that way. (I still have buckets of the other stuff that I will one day sort through when I have time-my guess is that 90 percent of it will end up in the dumpster.)
Every parent I talked with about this trophy phenomenon laughed out loud when I asked about their trophy “walls”— which ranged from refrigerators, actual walls, and special cases to scrapbooks and digitally produced memory books full of photos of the exact moments the honors were bestowed. Parents who have yet to touch their out-of-the-house grown children’s rooms talked either from a point of pride in the accomplished children they raised or with a bit of embarrassment that they hadn’t cleaned those rooms out yet. One parent of a twenty-five-year-old said, “I still have the ‘My Child is an Honor Student’ bumper sticker on my car, and my daughter graduated from college two years ago.”
