Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture / Edition 1

by Hilary Levey Friedman

Overview

Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture follows the path of elementary school-age children involved in competitive dance, youth travel soccer, and scholastic chess.

Why do American children participate in so many adult-run activities outside of the home, especially when family time is so scarce? By analyzing the roots of these competitive afterschool activities and their contemporary effects, Playing to Win contextualizes elementary school-age children's activities, and suggests they have become proving grounds for success in the tournament of life—especially when it comes to coveted admission to elite universities, and beyond.

In offering a behind-the-scenes look at how "Tiger Moms" evolve, Playing to Win introduces concepts like competitive kid capital, the carving up of honor, and pink warrior girls. Perfect for those interested in childhood and family, education, gender, and inequality, Playing to Win details the structures shaping American children's lives as they learn how to play to win.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520276765
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	08/03/2013
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	355
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Hilary Levey Friedman, PhD is an affiliate of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. She recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University as a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy and she received her PhD in Sociology from Princeton University.

Read an Excerpt

Playing to Win

RAISING CHILDREN IN A COMPETITIVE CULTURE

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By HILARY LEVEY FRIEDMAN

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-27675-8

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CHAPTER 1

Outside Class

A HISTORY OF AMERICAN CHILDREN'S COMPETITIVE ACTIVITIES

Middle-class children's lives are filled with adult-organized activities, while working-class and poor children fill their days with free play and television watching. This is one of the central observations of Annette Lareau's ethnographic study of families raising third-grade children around Philadelphia. Lareau's findings about the way children from middle-class families use their time is consistent with popular conceptions of overscheduled American kids who are chauffeured and schlepped from activity to activity on a daily basis.

Of course the overscheduled children of the middle class not only participate in myriad after-school activities; they also compete. These elementary school–age kids try out for all-star teams, travel to regional and national tournaments, and clear off bookshelves to hold all of the trophies they have won. It has not always been this way. About a hundred years ago, it would have been the lower-class children competing under nonparental adult supervision while their upper-class counterparts participated in noncompetitive activities, often in their homes. Children's tournaments, especially athletic ones, came first to poor children—often immigrants—living in big cities.

Not until after World War II did these competitive endeavors begin to be dominated by children from the middle and upper-middle classes. In the 1970s American children witnessed an explosion of growth in both the number of participants and the types of competitive opportunities available to them. This growth crowded out many who could not pay to play.

Today it costs a lot to participate in a diverse set of competitive circuits and tournaments that are now big business. For future Michelle Wies there is a youth PGA; for future Dale Earnhardts there is a kids' NASCAR circuit; and for future Davy Crocketts there are shooting contests. There is even a Junior Bull Riders circuit that starts children as young as three in mutton-busting contests, trying to stay on a lamb as long as possible. These competitive activities charge participant fees and give out ranked awards at events where young kids risk injury to be number one. The forces that have led to increasing in e quality in education, the workplace, and other spheres have come to the world of play. This means that Competitive Kid Capital is unequally distributed.

What are the social forces that have shaped the evolution of these children's competitive activities from roughly the turn of the twentieth century up to the present? The answer is linked to major changes in three social institutions: the family, the educational system, and the organization of competition and prizes. This chapter provides a history of the development of competitive children's activities in the United States. To illustrate this history, I examine the evolution of the three case study activities: chess, soccer, and dance.

COMPETITIVE AFTER - SCHOOL HOURS OVER TIME

Beginning in the late nineteenth century compulsory education had important consequences for families and the economy. With the institution of mandatory schooling children experienced a profound shift in the structure of their daily lives, especially in the social organization of their time. Compulsory education brought leisure time into focus; since "school time" was delineated as obligatory, "free time" could now be identified as well.

What to do with this free time? The question was on the minds of parents, social workers, and "experts" who doled out advice on child rearing. The answer lay partly in competitive sports leagues, which started to evolve to hold the interest of children, the first phase in the development of children's competitive activities. Overall we can identify three key periods of development: the first runs from the Progressive Era through World War II; the second moves from the postwar period to the 1970s; and the third takes us from the 1980s into the present.

Seeds of Competition: Progressive Era to World War II

The Progressive Era, with its organizational and reform impulses, inevitably focused on children's lives. These impulses gave rise to some of the earliest organized competitive events among American children. For example, reformers concerned about the health of babies started "better baby" contests in 1908 as a way to teach primarily immigrant and lower-class mothers the values of hygiene and nutrition. The contests were often held at state fairs, where judges evaluated children along several dimensions, including measurements and appearance, in order to find the "healthiest" or the "most beautiful" baby. These contests required little more of the baby than to submit to being poked, prodded, and put on display; the competition was really among adults.

Reformers didn't forget older children. With the simultaneous rise of mandatory schooling and laws restricting child labor, worry mounted over the idle hours of children, which many assumed would be filled with delinquent or self-destructive activities. Urban reformers were particularly preoccupied with poor immigrant boys who, because of overcrowding in tenements, were often on the streets.

Reformers' focus was less on age-specific activities and more generally on "removing urban children from city streets." Initial efforts focused on the establishment of parks and playgrounds, and powerful, organized playground movements developed in New York City and Boston. But because adults "did not trust city boys to play unsupervised," attention soon shifted to organized sports.

Sports were seen as important in teaching the "American" values of cooperation, hard work, and respect for authority. Progressive reformers thought athletic activities could prepare children for the "new industrial society that was emerging," which would require them to be physical laborers. Organized youth groups such as the YMCA took on the responsibility of providing children with sports activities.

In 1903 New York City's Public School Athletic League for Boys (PSAL) was established, and formal contests between children, organized by adults, emerged as a way to keep the boys coming back to activities, clubs, and school. Formal competition ensured the boys' continued participation since they wanted to defend their team's record and honor. Luther Gulick, founder of the PSAL, thought, "Group loyalty becomes team loyalty, and team loyalty enhances school loyalty, for the spirit of loyalty and morality demonstrated publicly spreads to all the students, not just those who compete."

A girls' league within the PSAL was founded in 1905, though many of the combative and competitive elements present in the boys' league were eliminated. In 1914 the New York version became part of the city's Board of Education. By 1910 seventeen other cities across the United States had formed their own competitive athletic leagues modeled after New York City's PSAL. Settlement houses and ethnic clubs soon followed suit. The number of these boys' clubs grew rapidly through the 1920s, working in parallel with school leagues.

The national spelling bee, a nonathletic competitive activity for children, also grew in popularity at this time. Spelling bees, known historically as spelling fights or spelling parties, are an American folk tradition. Throughout the eighteenth century they were part of the typical Colonial education, and by the nineteenth century they had developed into community social events. By the turn of the twentieth century spelling bees had evolved into a competitive educational tool. In her history of American childhood from 1850 to 1950 Priscilla Ferguson Clement explains, "Individual competition was also a constant in [late] nineteenth-century schools. In rural areas, teachers held weekly spelling bees in which youngsters stood in a line before the teacher (toed the line) and vied to be at the head of the line rather than at the foot."

Around the turn of the twentieth century a social movement formed to promote a national student-only bee. The first nationwide student bee was held on June 29, 1908. But due to racial tensions (after a young black girl won), the next national student spelling bee was not held again until the 1920s. By 1925 the national student spelling bee as we know it, complete with corporate sponsorship, had taken shape.

Other community-based competitions, such as Music Memory Contests and mouth organ contests, were also popular at this time. Additionally, in 1934 the organization that would become the National Guild of Piano Teachers' National Piano Playing Tournament was formed.

During this time children from wealthier families generally received a variety of lessons thought to enhance their social skills and prospects. In a history of children from different class backgrounds in the United States, Harvey Graff wrote of one new upper-middle-class, turn-of-the-century family, the Spencers: "The Spencer children went to dancing school, dressing the part and meeting their peers of the opposite sex. The girls were given music lessons, with varying degrees of success." These activities were organized and overseen by adults but were not yet competitive. (This was especially true for dance, as I discuss below.)

By the 1930s this pattern began to shift as a consequence of the Great Depression and as educational philosophies changed. During the Depression, many clubs with competitive leagues suffered financially and had to close, so poorer children from urban areas began to lose sites for competitive athletic contests organized by adults. Fee-based groups, such as the YMCA, began to fill the void, but usually only middle-class kids could afford to participate.

At roughly the same historical moment athletic organizations were founded that would soon formally institute national competitive tournaments for young kids, for a price. National pay-to-play organizations, such as Pop Warner Football and Little League Baseball, came into being in 1929 and 1939, respectively.

At the same time, many physical education professionals stopped supporting athletic competition for children because of worries that leagues supported competition only for the best athletes, leaving the others behind. Concerns about focusing on only the most talented athletes developed into questions about the harmfulness of competition. Historian Susan Miller explains: "Basketball, like all team sports, came under fire for a flaw that no amount of rule changes could rectify; critics charged that they inherently encouraged unnecessary and potentially harmful competition.... Critics argued that team sports put too much focus on winning at the expense of good sportsmanship and thus encouraged the rise of star athletes instead of fostering full participation by all team members."

In the end this meant that much of the organized youth competition left the school system. But it did not leave American childhood. "By allowing highly organized children's sport to leave the educational context," Jack Berryman, a medical historian, explains, "professional educators presented a golden opportunity to the many voluntary youth-related groups in America." The concatenation of concerns about competition and the financial realities of the Depression created an environment wherein organized, competitive, pay-to-play activities for kids would flourish outside of the school system in places like Pop Warner and Little League.

Overall during this "seeds of competition" period a transformation occurred both in the time spent in organized competition and in the types of children who participated in these activities. Earlier in the century, affluent children participated in personal growth activities where they did not encounter much organized competition, as the activities were more than anything a form of social grooming. But with the development of national compulsory schooling there had to be a way to distinguish the achievements of children from different classes. (Not surprisingly the 1930s also saw the development of gifted programs, and in 1941 the Hunter College Campus for the Gifted was founded in New York City.) As school became more competitive, so too did the time children spent outside of school—particularly for those from upwardly mobile families.

Growth of Competition: Postwar to the 1970s

During this period competitive children's activities experienced "explosive growth" in terms of the number of activities available and the number of participants. In the de cades following World War II a variety of competitive activities began to be dominated by children of the middle class. As the activities became more organized, competition intensified within the middle class.

One of the first children's activities to become nationally organized in a competitive way, and certainly one of the most well-known and successful youth sports programs, is Little League Baseball. After its creation in 1939 the League held its first World Series only a decade later, in 1949. In the ensuing years Little League experienced a big expansion in the number of participants, including participants from around the world. As this model of children's membership in a national league organization developed, fees to play increased.

With the success of these fee-based national programs it became more difficult to sustain free programs. Most elementary schools no longer sponsored their own leagues due to concerns over the effects of competition on children, similar to concerns voiced in the 1930s. The desire to dampen overt competition in school classrooms was part of the self-esteem movement that started in the 1960s.

The self-esteem movement focused on building up children's confidence and talents without being negative or comparing them to others. As the movement did not reach outside activities, such as sports, private organizations rushed to fill the void. Parents increasingly wanted more competitive opportunities for their children and were willing to pay for it.

By the 1960s more adults had become involved in these organizations, especially parents. Parents and kids spent time together at practices for sports that were part of a national structure: Biddy basketball, Pee Wee hockey, and Pop Warner football. Even nonteam sports were growing and developing their own formal, national-level organizations run by adults. For example, Double Dutch jump-roping started on playgrounds in the 1930s; in 1975 the American Double Dutch League was formed to set formal rules and sponsor competitions.

An often overlooked event in the history of children's sports, and especially competitive sports, is the passage of the Amateur Sports Act in 1978. This congressional bill established the U.S. Olympic Committee, largely taking away the function of the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU). Born out of the Cold War and the desire to defeat the USSR in sports, the U.S. Olympic Committee brought together the national governing bodies for each Olympic sport. The AAU had to find a new function; over the next two decades they transformed themselves into a powerful force in the organization of children's competitive sports, serving as a national organization overseeing a variety of children's competitive sports, such as swimming and volleyball.

Nonathletic competitions for children also began to take off in this time period. One example is child beauty pageants. The oldest continuously running child beauty pageant in the United States, Our Little Miss, started in 1961. This pageant was modeled on an adult system, the Miss America Pageant, with local and regional competitions followed by a national contest. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s child beauty pageants began "mushrooming at an unbelievably fast rate." By the late 1970s there was even a media-recognized "pageant circuit." A 1977 Chicago Tribune story reported, "Youngsters who travel the circuit learn how to fill the bill wherever they are, acting naïve and spontaneous here and knocking them dead with vampiness there."

Whether the yardstick was academics, athletics, or appearance, by the 1970s parents (mostly those who were educated and upwardly mobile) wanted their children to "be better than average in all things, so they tried to provide them with professionally run activities that would enrich their minds, tone their bodies, inculcate physical skills, and enhance their self-esteem." National organizations went along with this impulse to be better than average by instituting national guidelines and contests. Even programs that had a philosophy of "everyone plays," such as the American Youth Soccer Organization (discussed more below), joined the competitive fray by hosting elimination tournaments where there was only one victor. These competitions began to be geared to children of younger and younger ages.
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Playing to Win by HILARY LEVEY FRIEDMAN. Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Preface: Enter to Grow in Wisdom

Introduction: Play to Win
1. Outside Class: A History of American Children’s Competitive Activities
2. More than Playing Around: Studying Competitive Childhoods
3. Cultivating Competitive Kid Capital: Generalist and Specialist Parents Speak
4. Pink Girls and Ball Guys? Gender and Competitive Children’s Activities
5. Carving Up Honor: Organiz ing and Profiting from the Creation of Competitive Kid Capital
6. Trophies, Triumphs, and Tears: Competitive Kids in Action
Conclusion: The Road Ahead for My Competitive Kids

Appendix: Questioning Kids: Experiences from Fieldwork and Interviews
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Editorial Reviews

09/02/2013
In this impressive study, sociologist Friedman explores the American trend of middle-class elementary-school-age children participating in competitive activities. She identifies “Competitive Kid Capital”—“(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”—as an advantage that parents hope will carry their children to elite colleges and successful lives. Here, tournament chess, competitive dance, and travel soccer serve as examples that show how parents, children, coaches, and others create a tightly scheduled subculture in which extrinsic rewards matter and the carving up of honor is balanced against a savvy awareness among children that “participation” awards don’t confer real status. Although parents want to raise well-rounded children, Friedman also sees, among parents, grooming for normative gender and social roles, with parents sharing definitions of boys as jocks, nerds, or “fags” and girls as graceful, aggressive, or “pink warriors.” By interviewing both parents and children, Friedman provides great insight about each group. This study is vital reading for parents and educators interested in how the American idea of winners and losers is trickling down to the next generation. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"This book is a must-read for scholars interested in family, childhood, and stratification. It would also be a thought-provoking text for undergraduate students, many of whom may have participated in competitive activities throughout their lives."

Sociology of Sport Journal

"Richly textured... insightful." 

Contemporary Sociology - Erendira Rueda

"In leading up to her examination of the characteristics and motivations of modern-day chess families, Friedman delights lovers of of historical and global context by tracking the evolution of competitive chess among young people in the United States."

Chess Life

"If you are interested in after-school activities and the future prospects of the children who participate in them, Playing to Win by Hilary Levey Friedman is a must-read. An astute, well-researched and clearly written account, the book examines the ins and outs of today’s competitive youth culture across three different arenas: chess, soccer and dance."

Child Brain

"Top 12 Must-Read Education Books . . . . Harvard sociologist Friedman follows children involved in chess, dance and soccer, showing the differences among these sub-groups, how and why these competitive activities work and the resulting implications for inequality and gender in the educational system."

ParentMap Magazine - Alison Krupnick

"Given the considerable competitive pressure on even young children to prepare for elite colleges and lucrative careers, this study is timely and provocative...Nonspecialists who have read both Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and Lenore Skenazy's Free-Range Kids: How To Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry ) may find it of interest."-- "Library Journal" (10/1/2013 12:00:00 AM)

"If you are interested in after-school activities and the future prospects of the children who participate in them, Playing to Win by Hilary Levey Friedman is a must-read. An astute, well-researched and clearly written account, the book examines the ins and outs of today's competitive youth culture across three different arenas: chess, soccer and dance."-- "Brain, Child" (1/13/2014 12:00:00 AM)

"Impressive. . . . This study is vital reading for parents and educators interested in how the American idea of winners and losers is trickling down to the next generation."-- "Publishers Weekly" (9/2/2013 12:00:00 AM)

"In leading up to her examination of the characteristics and motivations of modern-day chess families, Friedman delights lovers of of historical and global context by tracking the evolution of competitive chess among young people in the United States."-- "Chess Life" (11/1/2013 12:00:00 AM)

"Top 12 Must-Read Education Books . . . . Harvard sociologist Friedman follows children involved in chess, dance and soccer, showing the differences among these sub-groups, how and why these competitive activities work and the resulting implications for inequality and gender in the educational system."--Alison Krupnick, ParentMap Education Editor "ParentMap Magazine" (9/26/2013 12:00:00 AM)

"Richly textured... insightful." --Erendira Rueda "Contemporary Sociology"

"This book is a must-read for scholars interested in family, childhood, and stratification. It would also be a thought-provoking text for undergraduate students, many of whom may have participated in competitive activities throughout their lives."-- "Sociology of Sport Journal" (11/11/2015 12:00:00 AM)

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