We usually discuss trophy spouses, but trophy children are equally prevalent in our society.
Parents often steer their children toward certain pursuits—whether academic, artistic, or athletic—not primarily for the child’s wellbeing, but to enhance their own image. If the child succeeds, the parents can showcase them, boasting of their achievements as though they were their own.
At times this boasting or flaunting carries subtle revenge, a get-back at those who looked down on the parents, with the child selfishly being used as a tool in a battle they never chose.
Even if they don’t succeed, parents still manage their kids, tinkering with various paths in hopes of engineering success. Though they may claim it’s all for the child’s benefit, they program their children to view life and relationships from a lens of performance and conditional value.
I posit that this is often fueled by a zero-sum mindset. That is for someone to succeed, another must fail. Resources and recognition are viewed as finite, requiring competition to secure the best possible outcome.
To best compete, one has to have the best stats and parents prime their children to perform in these arenas, although they are merely just replicating the zero-sum games they themselves had to play.
While this may hold true in certain situations, human capabilities are diverse enough that we can often attain what we need without direct competition. Parents often miss this nuance engineering their children in a certain path, sometimes at the cost of the child’s autonomy, even when their child’s faculties are competent enough to help them charter their own course.
Origins of the Trophy Child
For some parents, children become vessels for living out dreams they themselves failed to realize. They might have aspired for greatness in a particular field but for whatever reason, that boat sailed. They sense that, through their children, they can actualize these lost ambitions.
Others pursue status or material gain.
They initiate a “Project Mbappe” when their child shows athletic talent, or a “Project Einstein” when their child demonstrates intellectual gifts.
In the aforementioned case parents consciously engineer their younglings into roles that they think would best yield a material or reputational reward. And to be fair, this strategy sometimes works: the child’s success can indeed elevate the entire family for generations.
Yet whether this external success translates to internal fulfillment is a separate and often unanswered question.
Perhaps more common but less explored is how children become trophies unconsciously. When parents fail to provide a sanctuary, children, especially sensitive or precocious ones are forced to assume parental roles.
They learn to nurture themselves and even “parent” their siblings in ways their actual parents failed to do. At times, this caregiving extends to their parents themselves.
This is usually an attempt at breaking the chain of generational trauma. They sense that their parents, broken in their own ways, didn’t overcome their suffering and this isn’t necessarily their fault. And the child decides: “It all ends with me.”
This is a heavy cross to bear, a sacrifice that not all children who pick survive intact.
Very few succeed at this.
But for those who do, they become their parents’ pride — trophies.
This is both a blessing and a curse.
The blessing lies in developing exceptional competence, empathy and insight at an early age on human relationships, through surmounting great difficulty.
The curse is alienation. Parents, in their incompetence, fail to recognize the tremendous difficulty their child has overcome. Instead, they idolize the child as “the chosen one” through whom they have been delivered.
The child must grapple with the loss of childhood, which has been replaced by adult responsibilities. Despite outward success, an inner craving to be seen as a child still resides within.
It is often a profoundly lonely experience.
Psychological Consequences
Worth Tied to Achievement
Regardless of how a child becomes a trophy, the effect is similar: they learn to tether their worth to achievements, talents, or appearances. They fail to recognize that their inherent value exists independent of these external markers.
Even the child who learned to shepherd their family comes to believe their worth stems from their ability to protect and provide. The family, in turn, sees them as a symbol of hope or salvation. Other aspects of themselves that they wish could be seen or share with others fade into the background.
At a young age, lacking the vocabulary to articulate this discomfort, they internalize the belief that they are merely utilities through which functions or goals are realized.
They learn to recognize love as a transaction, their performance determining how much affection they receive. Relationships become conditional exchanges.
Distorted Relationship Dynamics
This mindset restructures how trophy children relate to others.
They approach connections as conditional transactions where failure to meet expectations—on either side—justifies withdrawing rapport or love. This pattern infiltrates friendships, romantic partnerships, and even professional relationships.
To be clear, relationships should not be devoid of expectations. However, healthy expectations emerge from an established foundation of rapport. Once friendship or love is established, expectations are calibrated to that foundation.
The dynamic I am exploring works in reverse: setting expectations as prerequisites for love or rapport.
When relationships begin from expectations rather than connection, desire or rapport becomes a negotiation. This approach masks a critical insecurity, a belief that one’s authentic self is insufficient to generate worthiness or interest.
External achievements become necessary compensations for this perceived deficit.
Consequently, trophy children’s relationships become artificial—carefully cultivated to maintain their status and secure what they seek. They create personas to fit into social circles, focus on material possessions to attract partners rather than authentic connection, and sacrifice wellbeing for career advancement—all because they’ve been conditioned to externalize their intrinsic worth.
For this choice, they pay a heavy price. In curating personas, they may form many acquaintances but few genuine friendships. They discover the hollowness of these connections, and in their desperation, they often resort to people-pleasing—a significant turnoff to most.
In romance, they might attract partners interested in appearances or status, not depth or authenticity. These relationships tend to also be materialistic, as trophy children believe they must lead with resources, money, or appearance.
With these as their only tools, they frequently attract the worst kinds of partners—those interested primarily in what can be extracted from the relationship. This compounds their suffering and reinforces their beliefs, convincing them they must give more and more to satisfy insatiable partners. They wonder whether they will ever be enough, approaching relationships from a position of fundamental disadvantage.
A classic zero-sum game.
The Savior Complex
Another trap lies for trophy children who took on adult responsibilities early: the savior complex.
The childhood mentality that they must fix everyone and everything infects their adult relationships. They stay in toxic relationships, believing they can fix or change them, when it was never worth it in the first place.
Their savior complex leads them into relationships where they are constantly fixing and helping, often at their own expense, for people who don’t deserve such sacrifice.
Within family, this dynamic may be unavoidable, and one must do their best without self-destructing. In friendships and romantic relationships, however, walking away is usually the wisest strategy.
You cannot change others, and by playing the white knight, you often make things worse—creating dependency that denies others the agency to address their own problems. Even in healthy relationships, when problems arise, your instinct is to fix the problem rather than support.
People don’t appreciate feeling incapable, and attempting to fix them creates strain, as they sense an aura of superiority from their would-be savior.
‘Saviors’ fail to recognize that human brokenness is universal. We choose to love despite our defects, not in the absence of them
Redemption
The bright side of this struggle is in realizing its futility.
Should grace find them, they realize that they have been investing wrongly. They realize that they need to direct all that providence within —nurturing themselves as they should have been nurtured but weren’t.
Even for those plagued by the white knight syndrome they realize that they don’t have to fix people nor suffer the company of the ignoble. They learn to curate connections based on shared values and mutual investment.
Life is too short and precious for it to be squandered on people and things that don’t matter. An insatiable void that takes without giving is not worth sacrificing one’s existence for.
The beauty about grace is that it will seek you out.
You will witness it externally through others: genuine relationships where love isn’t earned but given freely, friends who care without conditions, parents offering benevolent guidance without engineering specific outcomes, and people who do good for fulfillment, not for performance.
Grace will also call out to you from within, from the recesses of the soul, telling you that you are not a trophy.
That you are meant to live: pursuing that which naturally appeals to you, engaging in relationships that build, nurture and revitalize you, and approaching life authentically, not trying to fix that which doesn’t need to be fixed.
It will signal to you that you are worthy of these things and they are accessible to you.
Your feelings of unworthiness stem from flawed programming, which whilst was out of your control, can now be rejected so that you can start living.
If you fail to head grace’s call, breath becomes merely a clock ticking, and when time runs out, your soul will echo Ivan Illych’s lament:
It’s as if I had been going downhill when I thought I was going uphill. That’s how it was. In society’s opinion I was heading uphill, but in equal measure life was slipping away from me…And now it’s all over. Nothing left but to die!” — The Death of Ivan Illych, Leo Tolstoy
But it doesn’t have to be that way.