It’s hard to forget the kids who came to school with runny noses, ready to work themselves to exhaustion for the “Best Attendance” award.
Some people were jealous of them, and the rest couldn’t believe they never missed a day.
These kids are at the start of a never-ending cycle that will last until they get jobs as adults. They are tired and have a vague “bootstrap mentality.”
This TikTok dad has similar complaints about attendance awards, which clearly put money over the health of children.
This TikTok dad is shocked that his child got an award for going to school, especially after COVID-19.
On January 8, this worried dad made a TikTok video about “perfect attendance.” Jay, the first TikToker, wrote in the description of his video,
Perfect Attendance awards in elementary school were an early deposit of the idea that taking time off is ‘bad.’
In the comments below the video, people talk about their childhoods and even high school, where they remember kids who got awards for never missing a day for all four years.
My son won an award for being a good reader,
the TikTok dad says in his video,
At that ceremony, they also gave out awards for perfect attendance.
This dad says that attendance awards are silly because they are something they can’t change.
After what we just went through and are still going through, how are we rewarding students for something beyond their control?
he questions.
I realize it comes down to funding,
he says plainly, although he continues on with his critiques.
In a March 2021 article from the Washington Post, attendance is boiled down to one thing: money.
School districts need to offer incentives to get people to come to school so they can get better ratings, get more students, and get more money.
Not only does that make it easier for sick kids to go to school, but it also helps parents who have to pay very high rates for childcare at home.
Some people would say “win-win,” even if it hurts the students, but they do get a prize, right?
Should we really be encouraging parents to send their sick kids to school? Is that really the message we should be sending?
Awards like these send the message that a certain way of life is unhealthy and can’t be kept up for long. This gives parents a reason to enforce the rules, and it gives kids a reason to look for them.
In “this state of the world,” he says, it is dangerous to send sick kids to school.
Even though there is still a global pandemic going on, this dad wants to find a different way to praise his kids for their hard work instead of their immune systems.
And even if their hard work doesn’t win them a prize, their attendance will still be there, but in a very different way.
Reward the students who are responsible students and staying home with they’re ill,
the TikTok dad says,
instead of coming to school and getting their classmates sick.
Awards like these need to be changed so that they teach students, especially young ones like this dad, more useful things.
What’s the lesson that we’re teaching children? That they should feel guilty for getting sick. That they’re somehow less, not worth of an award, simply because they caught a cold.
Children are more likely to put their work before their health if they are rewarded for going to school.
Not only do these awards make students who already have to miss school feel worse, but they also praise everyone else for not being sick.
Students will fall behind even if they are sick, which is something they have no control over because the school district puts a high priority on attendance.
A 2019 study by a Harvard Ph.D. candidate backs up the idea that chronic absenteeism puts students at a huge disadvantage, but it questions whether or not common attendance awards are really helping.
Not only did they find the awards to be very demotivating for students, but they also found that the high-achieving students who went to school every day were hurt by them.
Students who received the award thought that they were attending more school than their classmates,
the study finds,
So, receiving the award seems to have left them feeling licensed to miss more school going forward.
