Playing to Win. Hilary Levey Friedman
competitive activities belong to organizations that keep records, the stakes are higher than in recreational leagues, and children can see that it matters that there is a record of success. These childhood competitive activities can also help kids learn how to recover from public failures and how to apply themselves and work hard in order to be long-term winners. Kids learn the identity of being a winner only by suffering a loss. This father summarizes the sentiment, trying to raise a son to be a winner in life:
This is what I’m trying to get him to see: that he’s not going to always win. And then from a competitive point of view, with him it’s like I want him to see that life is, in certain circumstances, about winning and losing. And do you want to be a winner or do you want to be a loser? You want to be a winner! There’s a certain lifestyle that you have to lead to be a winner, and it requires this, this, this and this. And if you do this, this, this and this, more than likely you’ll have a successful outcome.
Learning how to succeed given time limits is a critical skill as well—one of the “this” things you have to do to be a winner—and a critical component of Competitive Kid Capital. There are time limits for games, tournaments, and routines, and the competition schedule is also demanding, cramming many events into a weekend or short week. On top of that children need to learn how to manage their own schedules, which they might have to do someday as busy consultants and CEOs. One boy revealed how busy his young life is when he told me what soccer teaches him: “Dodging everything—like when we have to catch a train, and there are only a few more minutes, we have to run and dodge everyone. So, soccer teaches that.”
Children also learn how to perform and compete in environments that require adaptation, a fourth ingredient in the Competitive Kid Capital recipe. These environments may be louder, more distracting, colder, hotter, larger, or smaller than anticipated in preparations, but competitors, and especially winners, learn how to adapt. The adaptation requires focus on the part of children—to focus only on their performance and eventual success. The following quote by a mom of a fourth-grader links this to performing well on standardized tests:
It’s that ability to keep your concentration focused, while there’s stuff going on around you. As you go into older age groups, where people are coming in and out, the ability to maintain that concentration, a connection with what’s going on, on the board in front of you, and still be functional in a room of people, it’s a big thing. I mean to see those large tournaments, in the convention centers, I know it is hard. I did that to take the bar exam, and the LSAT I took for law school, and GREs. You do that in a large setting, but some people are thrown by that, just by being in such a setting. Well that’s a skill, and it’s a skill and it’s an ability to transfer that skill. It’s not just a chess skill. It’s a coping-with-your-environment skill.
Finally, in this pressure-filled competitive environment children’s performances are judged and assessed in a very public setting by strangers—the final component to Competitive Kid Capital. This dance mom explains:
I think it definitely teaches you awareness of your body and gives you a definite different stance and confidence that you wouldn’t have. For example, you’re told to stand a certain way in ballet, which definitely helps down the road. When she has to go to a job interview, she’s going to stand up straight because she’s got ballet training; she’s not going to hunch and she’s going to have her chin up and have a more confident appearance. The fact that it is not easy to get up on a stage and perform in front of hundreds or thousands of people, strangers, and to know that you’re being judged besides, definitely gives you a level of self-confidence that can be taken to other areas so again if she has to be judged by a teacher or when she’s applying for a job she’ll have more of that confidence, which helps you focus.
Children are ranked, both in relation to others’ performance in a particular competition and in relation to participants their age. These appraisals are public and often face-to-face, as opposed to standardized tests which take place anonymously and privately. Being able to perform under the gaze of others toughens children to shield their feelings of disappointment or elation, to present themselves as competent and confident competitors.
While all of the parents I met believe their children need to develop this Competitive Kid Capital to succeed later in life, most were also concerned that their kids lack free time to play or to “just be kids.” What is remarkable is that despite sometimes deep ambivalence, families keep their children involved in competitive activities. Even when the specific activity may change (for example, a child leaves soccer for lacrosse, or gymnastics for dance), children I met remain actively engaged in competition and in their second-shift activities after school. Their parents want to ensure they are giving their young children every possible opportunity to succeed in the future, in an often unpredictable world, by encouraging them to acquire and stockpile Competitive Kid Capital.
A PREVIEW OF THE COMPETITION
The following six chapters further contextualize how and why parents want their children to acquire Competitive Kid Capital by analyzing the roots and perceived benefits of participation in competitive children’s activities. Each chapter answers some overarching questions: Why have these competitive activities developed over time? How is the competition structured now, and in each research site? Why do parents believe these competitive activities and Competitive Kid Capital to be so important in their children’s lives? How do parents make decisions about the specific competitive activities for their children? In what ways is there an industry behind these organized competitive activities? What do the children think about their participation in these competitive activities?
Chapter 1 is a historical analysis of competitive activities for American children. Here I ask: What are the social forces that have shaped the evolution of children’s competitive activities from roughly the turn of the twentieth century up to the present? I show that organized, competitive children’s activities developed for elementary school–age kids but then became more prevalent among middle-class children than among their lower-class counterparts due to major changes in three social institutions: the family, the educational system, and the organization of competition and prizes in the United States. I trace the history of the development of competitive children’s activities in general and then offer a brief history of competitive chess, dance, and soccer.
Chapter 2 describes the contemporary structure of these activities and my field sites, drawing on mixed methods and triangulated data from fieldwork observations, adult interviews, and child interviews. Chapter 3 turns to the parents themselves, presenting descriptive data on the parents I studied in each activity and analyzing the beliefs that motivate the parents to enroll their children in these activities. We see striking similarities among all the parents, mainly in their narratives about how their children got started in their particular activities and the ways they talk about the benefits they think their children acquire through participation. Their narratives are well-developed, suggesting a shared worldview about the future by both generalist and specialist parents. The components of Competitive Kid Capital that parents want their children to acquire are described in detail in this chapter.
Chapter 4 turns to the differences that demarcate chess, dance, and soccer, particularly when it comes to gender. For example, why do some parents strategically select soccer rather than dance for their daughters? I argue that divergent gender scripts explain the pathways parents are choosing for their kids. Parents of dancers have more traditional gender ideas, emphasizing gracefulness and appearance, while soccer parents with daughters want to raise aggressive, or “alpha,”50 girls. I make the case that this distinction reveals forms of classed femininity, one of the most provocative arguments in Playing to Win. As the soccer parents can largely be thought of as upper-middle class and the dance parents as middle and lower-middle class, this shows an emerging gender divide within the middle class around aspirations for girls.
Chapter 5 delves deeper into the organizational context that surrounds parental decision making. Many of the parenting practices I observed are embedded in institutions, and these institutions offer a critical mediating level between individual choice and societal “culture.” I argue that there is a world of competitive childhood, designed to maximize acquisition of Competitive Kid Capital—and ordered to make money off parents who are focused on its acquisition. I discuss similarities in