A Sheet of Gold Stars

Posted under A Geek Dad's Life, Blog Posts

My wife and I took the kids to the local zoo on Saturday, and a volunteer at the zoo gave my 3 year-old a sheet of shiny gold star stickers.  It wasn’t until we got home when my daughter gave me one of the gold star stickers that I realized the power contained in each one of those stickers.

Ah, the gold star… placed by your name, on a list of names.

I sat there at the dining room table, staring at my 3 year-old’s sheet of 100 gold star stickers and I tried to absorb the fact that “they were just stickers.” I almost giggled when I realized that I could now, as an adult, go buy 100,000 of those gold star stickers and place them on everything I own and everything I make. 

Why, I could put one on my Zune and say “For the world’s best music player.”  I could put one on my refrigerator and say “For the world’s best food-keeper-colder.”  I could put one on each of my software design memos and put an “A++” with a circle around it, with a handwritten “Nice Job!” next to the gold star.  I would have the ultimate power!

My mood turned sour as my ethics awoke; The Gold Star is not a toy.  The Gold Star is an honor, bestowed upon you by a higher authority.  Just because you are now an adult does not mean that you can bestow it upon yourself.

The fact that just anyone can walk in to a store and buy a sheet of Gold Star stickers troubles me deeply.  In my opinion, buying a sheet of those stickers should be as difficult as buying a roll of U.S. currency paper on which you could print any amount of money you wished.  If you had a sheet of those Gold Star stickers, you could fool yourself into thinking that you actually did a good job, and you could probably find some other people to share in your self-congratulatory circle jerk. 

You could start a new religion by convincing people that the important part of feeling happy was the “feeling of accomplishment” and not the actual accomplishment itself.  You could teach people how to remember the “gold star feeling,” meditate for a bit, and have that sense of accomplishment without actually accomplishing anything!  You could call your new organization “The Association for Gold Star Stickers for All Mankind,” open a ‘retreat center,’ and you could teach each others how to fool their brains into getting gold stars without actually earning them.

Blasphemy.  Gold Stars are special because of the effort and sacrifice that they represent.  They are the “Purple Heart” of our adolescence, and I will not let my children merely play with gold star stickers.  They can play with blue, red, and green stars, but never gold.  They’ll have to earn those, and when they do earn the gold stars, the stickers will be affixed to each item for which they earned the gold star.  That is my way of delineating the boundary between ‘pretending’ and ‘deceiving yourself.’

When my wife reads this, she will think that I am crazy to fixate on such a small thing.  She will wonder why I want to torture the kids.  When I describe these ideologies to her, her eyes just glaze over and she quits listening; she just waits for the noise to stop and then she says “Ok, honey.” 

Enforcement of this “Gold Star Edict” will be my burden.  Mine, and mine alone.