Playing to Win. Hilary Levey Friedman
youngest players, who are soon to graduate from preschool or kindergarten, finish their four games quickly. The tournament directors hold the awards ceremony for this group early in the afternoon. As the children sit down near the trophy-filled table they had been inspecting so closely earlier, their parents gather around, cameras at the ready. The tournament announcer explains that this section had seventeen competitors. Miraculously they have all tied for first place.
“Quite an achievement,” the announcer intones, deadpan, as the parents look at one another and laugh.
The children clap excitedly. This section is the only one in which all the players receive a trophy for participating. A father whose child is too old to compete in this group laments to another dad, “My son is going to explode if he doesn’t get a trophy.”
Another father, sitting in the back of the cafeteria with his wife (they are one of the few couples present), watches the youngest kids with a smile. His son is a second-grader who is already playing in the tournament’s most advanced section. This father and son seem to share a special bond, signified by their matching T-shirts emblazoned with characters from Toy Story and a tagline from the movie, “To Infinity and Beyond.” As his son prepares to play his last-round game, the man turns to me and declares, “I never would have thought I’d end up spending my weekends in a cafeteria basement, waiting around for my son!”
Why do so many families spend their weekends watching their children compete? To answer this question I present evidence from three case study activities (one academic, chess; one artistic, dance; and one athletic, soccer) drawn from sixteen months of fieldwork with ninety-five families who live around a major metropolitan area in the Northeast—including 172 separate interviews with parents, children, and teachers and coaches. I argue that the extensive time devoted to competition is driven by parents’ demand for credentials for their children, which they see as a necessary and often sufficient condition for entry into the upper-middle class and the “good life” that accompanies it. I develop the concept of “Competitive Kid Capital” to explore the ways in which winning has become central to the lives of American children.
TO INFINITY AND BEYOND?
The “To Infinity and Beyond” dad, Josh,2 and his wife, Marla, are dermatologists in private practice. They work full time while raising eight-year-old Jeremiah in the center of Metro, a large city in the northeastern United States. Marla and Josh also have an older daughter who is a freshman at Duke University.
Jeremiah attends one of the best independent day schools in the country and has already distinguished himself outside of school. He is one of the top fifty chess players for his age in the country, and he plays on one of the most selective travel soccer teams in the city. Jeremiah also takes private piano lessons and a music theory class at the “top” local music instruction school.
Josh, who grew up outside of Pittsburgh, says that Jeremiah’s childhood is “totally different” from his own. “I never played in an outside-of-school sports thing,” he explained in a soft-spoken voice. “I didn’t play soccer, except pick-up games. I guess I played some neighborhood softball games. But I never did chess in an organized way, and I never did soccer in an organized way. My dad was never involved as a coach.” In contrast, Josh acts as an “assistant coach” for Jeremiah’s team, which like many travel teams, employs a paid non-parent head coach.
Both Marla and Josh are familiar faces at chess tournaments and on the sidelines of Jeremiah’s soccer games. Marla often sits perched in a chair, reading a book or socializing with other parents when they approach her. Josh is more gregarious among the chess parents from Jeremiah’s school. He thinks of most of these parents as a “pretty compatible and nice group” and told me, “I was imagining [starting] a book club because we sit around during these tournaments.”
Josh and Marla get a lot of plea sure out of hugging the sidelines while Jeremiah puts himself through the paces of these tournaments. “It’s a tag team thing,” Josh explains. “[We] both want to, if not hunger to, participate in his ups and downs.” Of course that’s often difficult to manage with work and family obligations and community and religious responsibilities. Marla describes how they handle the details of Jeremiah’s extracurricular life: “Things that Jeremiah does on Thursdays and Fridays, he does with our nanny. But Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, it’s Josh and I. Monday, Wednesday it’s me; Josh is Tuesday.”
Marla thinks that at this stage, Jeremiah should avoid specializing in any one activity. He should pursue chess, music, and soccer at the same time, even if that means hiring additional help for the family to manage the logistics. “I would not want, at this age, unless he were a prodigy of some sort, for the focus to be only on one of those things,” Marla says earnestly. “I mean he’s my son, I think he’s a great kid and he’s got a lot of talents, but he’s not a prodigy. At this point, he needs to develop all sorts of aspects of his interests.”
Josh articulates his parenting philosophy in a slightly different way, explaining that Jeremiah has “got lots of muscles and it’s exciting to think of him using them all and making the best of them.” Being well-rounded and benefiting from the exposure to many different activities, hence working different “muscles,” seems to his parents the right strategy for Jeremiah, especially since he is not the absolute best in any of them. Breadth muscles, and not just depth muscles, are necessary to reach infinity and beyond.
But Josh describes his son as primarily a “ball guy”: “Well, Jeremiah gravitates toward any round object. When he was younger he could maneuver a little round object, like dribble it, and to see that little toddling creature, that was amazing. . . . So it was clear that he was a ball guy.”
In conversation Josh highlighted Jeremiah’s soccer skills, likely because soccer draws them especially close together. But the attraction to soccer is more than this. When Josh talks about his son’s soccer career his voice deepens and his stance changes. He clenches his fist when he says “ball guy,” as the masculine image of athletics appears to especially appeal to him.
Given their “multiple-muscles” theory, it is not surprising that Josh and Marla have chosen activities to provide complementary skills for their son. “The team aspect in soccer is essential,” Josh notes. “People work together [on the field]. . . . And it’s not at all like that in chess because when you’re competing as a chess player, you’re not working with other teammates, you’re essentially working on your own.”
Marla listed a different set of skills she thinks Jeremiah derives from competitive chess: “Chess really helps with and reinforces the capacity to focus and concentrate. It’s also amazing in terms of what it imbues a child with—strategic thinking, advance planning, and awareness of consequences.”
Josh and Marla think that these skills—teamwork, focus, and strategic thinking—are of great value in adult life. Even though the biggest tournament of all, the college admissions process, is ten years off for Jeremiah, they think about it frequently. Jeremiah’s prospects are good, Josh reflects: “[Our daughter] got someplace good, so even more I feel like Jeremiah will get something good because he’s going to be a high achiever or an overachiever.”
“I’m realizing I have very high expectations for Jeremiah,” Marla adds. “I mean I’m his mom, but he’s really, really smart, and he excels at school.” She went on, “He’s very self-driven, and so I feel like that’s going to propel him through life and if he’s lucky, and remains well, I could imagine him pursuing college and then a graduate degree, and some kind of exceptional work in what ever career he chooses.”
They know just how competitive the world can be because Marla and Josh are the survivors of many tournaments themselves. “Well, I mean I’m a Baby Boomer kid,” Marla notes. “There’s just such a [huge] population. Then my kids are Baby Boom-lets, so there’s just a crunch of less resources and a lot of people. So that’s partly the reason for the competition.” She continued, “You know, as I got older there was always a sense that you’ve got to have a lot of stuff you’re doing, your extracurriculars were meant to be strong. But it just didn’t start as young.”
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