Playing to Win. Hilary Levey Friedman
The founder, Debbie Roberts, explained her motivation for starting the competition: “It was my son’s participation in organized soccer that inspired me to start Showstopper. I saw how excited and challenged he was to play each week. When he would lose, he would leave the game saying, ‘I’ll try harder next week.’ He learned to practice and work hard to achieve all he knew he was capable of accomplishing.”83
Another form of competitive dance—though not the focus of this book—is ballroom dancing, which has also relied on similarities to athletics to aid growth. Social ballroom dancing had been popular since the time of academies like Dodworth. But social ballroom dancing steadily lost popularity through the first half of the twentieth century. By the time of Chubby Checker and nightclub dancing, social ballroom dancing was as its lowest point. Interestingly, this is the moment when the competition system for ballroom dancing started to develop in the United States, around the 1960s.84 By the 1980s this style of competitive ballroom dancing had been labeled DanceSport to “designate a competitive and more athletic form of ballroom in order to set it apart from its more recreational and social counterpart, which is often stereotypically visualized as dancing by seniors.”85
Just as ballroom dancing became more competitive from the 1960s to the 1980s, so too did the dance competitions that are the focus in Playing to Win. The early years of private competition were far less competitive than they are today. One dance teacher reflects, “My studio began competing around 1985. . . . Then probably in the early ’90s, some of the stronger studios started coming alive.”86 This teacher went on to explain that today the costs of participation (entry fees, costume costs, etc.) is much, much higher than in the 1980s and 1990s and that in some areas of the country a lot of the camaraderie that used to exist between teachers and studios has been replaced by animosity. The proliferation of dance competitions, “sparse thirty years ago,”87 has also fueled the proliferation of thousands of dance studios, which explicitly train students to participate in the competitive events.
There is continued growth in competitive dance in the twenty-first century as some of the major competitions attempt to organize themselves into a dance competition federation. Popularity and growth has been reinforced by such TV shows as So You Think You Can Dance and Dance Moms, which feature many “competition kids” and their tricks. These tricks, such as triple turns performed by nine-year-olds, are a sign of the hypercompetitive atmosphere. To win, children have to perform feats that were rare twenty years ago and certainly not expected of children of their age.
Also unimaginable twenty years ago is the behavior of some adults involved with dance competitions. For example, some teachers and parents have been known to lie about the age of the competitors. Because of such misbehavior competitions now often require proof of age. This type of misconduct by adults highlights the current state of children’s competitive activities and how much is at stake for the adults who are involved.
CHANGES IN FAMILIES, EDUCATION, AND PRIZES
What factors explain why competitive activities like chess, dance, and soccer have developed in the way they have over the past century? In addition to the trends described above, I have identified three more macrohistorical trends to help clarify how we got to the point where adults lie about the age of children: changes in the America family, the American educational system, and the organization of prizes and competitions in American culture. Class is an important factor as well, overlaying the historical narrative and influencing the contemporary situation and its outcomes.
In Busier Than Ever!, their study of why American families are so busy in the early twenty-first century, anthropologists Darrah, Freeman, and English-Lueck suggest, “Smaller family sizes, the reluctance of parents to permit unsupervised children’s play, and preferences for structured, formalized children’s activities require adults to transport and supervise their children. Many parents have also become more involved in their children’s education and recreational activities reflecting shifting norms of good parenting.”88 Embedded in these reasons for the increase in busyness are some of the reasons for the increase in competition in children’s lives.
Demographic changes, such as fewer children in each family, profoundly affect the tenor of parenting. Parents can devote more time and attention to their children in smaller families; this also means that there is even more parental anxiety since there are fewer chances to see children succeed.89 More mothers now work outside the home as well, which affects child care arrangements. For many mothers, employment can produce parental guilt, as some delegation of socialization tasks must occur. This in turn may lead parents to indulge children in their competitive or organized activities more than they might have otherwise or to overcompensate for less physical time at home by being overinvolved in other ways.
Likely the most significant demographic change that has affected competitive children’s activities is the population booms: the Baby Boom and its Echo Boom. While Baby Boom parents have been the best-educated and wealthiest generation ever seen in the United States, that enormous cohort has overwhelmed every social-sorting institution it has come in contact with, from preschool classrooms to retirement homes.90 Hence the cultural experience of competition, of an insufficient supply of spots for the size of the group seeking them, has predisposed Boomers to see life as a series of contests. With their children’s cohort, the Echo Boom, if anything the competitive landscape is getting more crowded than it was in the Boomers’ formative years, and the stakes are even higher.
This is especially true when it comes to higher education. The 1960s saw “a growing competitive frenzy over college admissions as a badge of parental fulfillment.”91 Parental anxiety reached a new level because the surge in attendance by Boomers had strained college facilities, and it became increasingly clear that the top schools could not keep up with the demand, meaning that students might not be admitted to the level of college they expected, given their class background. This became even more problematic with the rise of coeducation and the nationalization and democratization of the applicant pool,92 fueled by the GI Bill, recruiting, and technology that produced better information for applicants. Parents took on the responsibility of ensuring that their children were successful in the college admissions process.
Interestingly, the competitive frenzy over college admissions did not abate in the 1970s and 1980s, when it was actually easier to gain admission to college, given the decline in application numbers after the Baby Boomers. Instead, more aware of the stakes, families became more competitive.93
With the Echo Boom in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it once again became harder to get into a “top” college.94 It is not just that there has been an increase in the college-age population, expected to have peaked in most areas by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century,95 but there have been record numbers of applications to the most elite colleges and universities. The years 2009–2013 brought record applicant pools for Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, and Brown.96
This reality, combined with the existing tension around college admissions, has created an incredibly competitive atmosphere for families, which starts at younger and younger ages now, as parents start earlier and earlier in their children’s lives on the long march to college admission. How early one starts seems to be related to class position. In some parts of the country some parents with higher class standing start grooming their children for competitive preschool admissions, setting their children on an Ivy League track from early on.97
After-school activities are a crucial supplement to in-school achievement and test scores. Performing well in activities that many parents perceive as integral to, but not entirely synonymous with, the formal educational system is seen as crucial. Why? Children can develop Competitive Kid Capital through their participation, which can be translated into the currency of credentials. Certain sports, such as squash and fencing, are especially helpful, as they signal elite status in the college admissions process.98
For those who wonder just why competitive children’s activities are so much more developed and organized in the United States than in other parts of the world, look no further than this admissions practice. While American society’s cultural attitude toward competition is more developed as well, the best structural explanation