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Goal! Touchdown! Home run! These timeless words echo through the generations. When did they become a bad thing? The answer is, they weren't a bad thing in the first place, and they're no where near being a bad thing now. Kids need competition, its motivation, its improvement, its bringing yourself up one more level. Competition isn't limited to sports, nor to physical activities, its getting the highest grade in the class, its that one last color on the canvas to make your artwork just a little more spectacular. Competition is everywhere, completely inescapable.

A girl is in a dance class, she looks to her teacher enviously because she can dance so well, and makes it her goal to succeed her. Years later, she does. She gets the part in the ballet, the lead her teacher had tried to get a decade before the girl came to her class. She goes on to become famous, always striving for one more up, and soon she's at the top, competing to keep it. Is this not competition? Is this not a good thing? Of course it is. Without competition we could not function.

Young people especially need it. They revel in it, often it's the only thing that keeps them centered when their emotions go crazy. They live to say anything you can do I can do better.' It gives them a purpose and prepares them for the future. When they are adults the competition is more serious, less fun then it was in their younger days-they need the preparation being young without a care except to get one more answer right then the kid that sits next to them in math. Would you rather them waste away, not devoting their life to anything because they'd rather not compete to get it? Granted, when you're competing for something there's got to be a loser along the way, but won't that one try all the harder to get to the top while they're young and full of energy, rather then when they are old and run-down.

Life could not be life without competition. It is the vastest, most valuable natural resource anyone could ask for. It fans the flames of inspiration in all of us, it is that small spark of light that brings even the most depressed, laziest teenager to life. To describe it in one word, it is necessity.

Learn more about this author, Kyara Starwater.
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