Playing to Win. Hilary Levey Friedman
in sports like lacrosse also provides a social class signifier in an era of needs-blind admissions.)
All of the Playing to Win parents were realistic about their children’s very slim chances of earning an NCAA scholarship, especially to a Division I school.39 Instead what the parents I met are looking for is what lacrosse is thought to provide: an admissions boost. This boost is strongest at Ivy League schools, where students are not awarded athletic scholarships, and at top liberal arts colleges, where sometimes more than half of the smaller student bodies are collegiate athletes.
Higher education admissions systems are certainly “tied to Little League and high school sports and [are] related as well to the shared sports values of our national culture.”40 While we don’t know with certainty that it is these specific activities that help children succeed in the college admissions race and beyond—because kids were not randomly assigned to competitive after-school activities—what matters is that parents believe participation in these activities is crucial and act accordingly while their children are still young.
That U.S. colleges and universities consider admissions categories other than academic merit is rooted in history and is uniquely American. Jerome Karabel shows how the “Big Three” of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale developed new admissions criteria in the 1920s to keep out “undesirables,” namely Jews and immigrants.41 This new system valued the “all-around man,” who was naturally involved in clubs and athletics. Karabel explains that the definition of admissions merit has continued to shift over time, and parents’ concern with college admissions for their children is “not irrational, especially in a society in which the acquisition of educational credentials has taken its place alongside the direct inheritance of property as a major vehicle for the transmission of privilege from parent to child. And as the gap between winners and losers in American grows ever wider—as it has since the early 1970s—the desire to gain every possible edge has only grown stronger.”42
While researching Playing to Win I met one father, who actually did not attend college himself, and he told me about his motivation for his third-grade daughter’s participation in competitive chess: “Well, if this helps her get into Harvard . . .” Another mother said that her son’s achievements “might help him stand out and get into a good school.” When I asked her to define a “good school” she replied, “Ivy League or equivalent, like Stanford”—though she had not attended any of these colleges.
While these parents had not attended the schools they were interested in for their children, that was not true for all the families I met. Karabel and the journalist Daniel Golden do find that at many institutions legacy status is powerful; Golden finds this to be especially true at the University of Notre Dame.43
We cannot know for sure that the way these affluent kids spend free time in their childhood will lead to their admission to these schools, which in turn will help maintain a class advantage. But we can say that the skills they acquire by participating in competitive childhood activities are certainly correlated.
In a society where a bachelor’s degree has become common, and in many circles is expected, the institution at which a degree was earned becomes a distinguishing feature,44 and many parents correctly believe these activities can help gain entry to more elite institutions. According to sociologist Mitchell Stevens, in his study of college admissions at an elite, private liberal arts college, “Families fashion an entire way of life organized around the production of measurable virtue in children.”45 Efforts to create this quantifiable virtue in children have led to the creation of a second shift for kids, which in turn has created what I call Competitive Kid Capital.
OVERCOMING CREDENTIALS BOTTLENECKS: THE ACQUISITION OF COMPETITIVE KID CAPITAL
Whenever children participate in activities, including unsupervised play or organized noncompetitive activities, they acquire skills through socialization.46 This is also true of participation in organized activities that do not have an explicitly competitive element, as I have argued elsewhere.47 But many activities that were previously noncompetitive have been transformed from environments that emphasized only learning skills, personal growth, and simple fun into competitive cauldrons in which only a few succeed: those who learn the skills necessary to compete and to win. Kids learn particular lessons from participation in competitive activities apart from normal childhood play.
There are two avenues by which parents think competitive activities can help children gain an edge: the specialist and the generalist avenues. Both pathways aid families in dealing with credentials bottlenecks because they help kids acquire skills and focus their time and energy. Parents think these activities help kids develop the kind of character that will be critical to success in the competitions that colleges, graduate schools, and employers pay attention to when making decisions.
The “specialist” avenue to the top has children competing to achieve national championships or awards for exceptional achievement. But this avenue requires specialization at an early age, professional coaching, high levels of raw talent, and substantial family resources, so only a few children can realistically pursue this path.
The “generalist” avenue is more common; it focuses on cultivating children into the all-around student who works “different muscles,” as Jeremiah’s parents put it. Generalist parents want their child to succeed in a variety of competitive endeavors, even though their child may not be the top competitor in one activity. Parents like Marla and Josh highlight particular skills that they think their children learn from participation in competitive activities, such as good sportsmanship, discipline and focus, and how to follow a schedule.
Often these generalist children try different activities in their youth, acquiring various skills from each before moving on to the next one, unless the kids really distinguish themselves in a particular activity and stick with it longer. As children get older there is often a transition from being a generalist to being a specialist, as the focus shifts from being well-rounded to attaining a special achievement, usually around high school.
Drawing upon Bourdieu’s work on both cultural capital (defined as proficiency and familiarity with dominant practices, particularly with respect to adeptness in the educational system) and the habitus (defined as a system of dispositions that manifests in various types of taste, such as speech and dressing),48 I label the lessons and skills that parents hope their children gain from participating in competitive activities “Competitive Kid Capital.” The character associated with this Competitive Kid Capital that parents want their children to develop is based on the acquisition of five skills and lessons, which emerged in conversations with parents: (1) internalizing the importance of winning, (2) bouncing back from a loss to win in the future, (3) learning how to perform within time limits, (4) learning how to succeed in stressful situations, and (5) being able to perform under the gaze of others.
Internalizing the importance of winning is a primary goal in acquiring Competitive Kid Capital. One parent told me, “I think it’s important for him to understand that [being competitive] is not going to just apply here, it’s going to apply for the rest of his life. It’s going to apply when he keeps growing up and he’s playing sports, when he’s competing for school admissions, for a job, for the next whatever.”
Competitive children’s activities reinforce winning, often at the expense of anything else, by awarding trophies and other prizes. Such an attitude appears to help bring success in winner-take-all settings like the school system and some labor markets.49 Though many activities do award participation trophies, especially to younger children, the focus remains on who wins the biggest trophy and the most important title.
Linked to learning the importance of victory is learning from a loss to win in the future, another component of Competitive Kid Capital. This skill involves perseverance and focus; the emphasis is on how to bounce back from a loss to win the next time. A mom explained, “The winning and losing is phenomenal. I wish it was something that I learned because life is really bumpy. You’re not going to win all the time and you have to be able to reach inside and come back. Come back and start fresh and they are able to. I’m not saying he doesn’t cry once in a while.