“Beautifully written, relentlessly insightful, and methodologically innovative, Playing to Win expertly captures the perspectives of parents and children regarding the importance of after school activities for socialization and childhood in contemporary American society. Hilary Levey Freidman has produced a sociological gem.”–William A. Corsaro, author of The Sociology of Childhood

“Hilary Levey Friedman has written an instant classic about parents, children, and the fervent pursuit of competitive honor in American society. Richly descriptive, terrifyingly honest, and beautifully written, Playing to Win is a must read for anyone who cares about the happiness and fulfillment of our children, the values we celebrate as a country, and the very foundations of our social world.”—Francesco Duina, author of Winning: Reflections on an American Obsession

“Hilary Levey Friedman’s Playing to Win is an essential social science volume that transcends the boundary between scholarship and popular critique. Levey Friedman successfully explains how upper-middle class Americans think about their children’s engagement in serious leisure: competitive chess, dance competitions, and youth soccer. Listening carefully to both parents and children, she reveals the tensions and contradictions, benefits and drawbacks of intense competitions, and provides a perspective necessary for researchers who examine child development and for parents who wish to raise happy, healthy children.”—Gary Alan Fine, author of With the Boys and Gifted Tongues: High School Debate and Adolescent Culture

“The world of 21st century childhood has found its superb interpreter. With sparkling arguments and fascinating evidence, Hilary Levey Friedman’s Playing To Win introduces us to one of America’s most remarkable contemporary innovations: the proliferation of organized, competitive after-school activities. An important contribution to the sociology of culture and inequality.”—Viviana A. Zelizer, author of Pricing the Priceless Child

“Hilary Levey Friedman has written a book of Tocquevillian dimension. Her insights into the worries and hopes of the many gendered facets and class-bound manifestations of America’s contemporary middle class are not only brilliant but presented in a lucid style that makes this book a real page turner. “Competitive Kid Capital” will rightly enter the vernacular of contemporary sociology.”—Andrei S. Markovits, co-author of SPORTISTA: Female Fandom in the United States

“Hilary Levey Friedman has managed to convince numerous upper middle class parents and their children to pause from their mad dash between extra-curricular activities to explain why they have chosen this lifestyle. Using information from detailed interviews across a variety of activities, she provides a revealing account of the motivations that lie behind the dramatic rise in competitive children’s activities. This fascinating book forms a key part of an emerging body of research that links the increase in time devoted to childcare to parents’ worries about their children’s economic futures.”—Valerie Ramey, Professor and Chair of Economics, University of California, San Diego

“It is a valuable study and an excellent, highly readable report. I recommend the book to anyone who wishes to understand the mental set of many modern parents, which leads them to turn what should be playtime into work time for their kids.”—Peter Gray, American Journal of Play

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.

Playing to Win

RAISING CHILDREN IN A COMPETITIVE CULTURE

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

Contents

Preface: Enter to Grow in WisdomIntroduction: Play to Win1. Outside Class: A History of American Children’s Competitive Activities2. More than Playing Around: Studying Competitive Childhoods3. Cultivating Competitive Kid Capital: Generalist and Specialist Parents
Speak4. Pink Girls and Ball Guys? Gender and Competitive Children’s Activities5. Carving Up Honor: Organizing and Profiting from the Creation of
Competitive Kid Capital6. Trophies, Triumphs, and Tears: Competitive Kids in ActionConclusion: The Road Ahead for My Competitive KidsAppendix: Questioning Kids: Experiences from Fieldwork and InterviewsNotesWorks CitedIndex

CHAPTER 1

Outside Class

A HISTORY OF AMERICAN CHILDREN’S COMPETITIVE ACTIVITIES

Middle-class children’s lives are filled with adult-organized activities, whileworking-class and poor children fill their days with free play and televisionwatching. This is one of the central observations of Annette Lareau’sethnographic study of families raising third-grade children aroundPhiladelphia. Lareau’s findings about the way children from middle-classfamilies use their time is consistent with popular conceptions of overscheduledAmerican kids who are chauffeured and schlepped from activity to activity on adaily basis.

Of course the overscheduled children of the middle class not only participate inmyriad after-school activities; they also compete. These elementary school–agekids 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 notalways been this way. About a hundred years ago, it would have been the lower-classchildren competing under nonparental adult supervision while their upper-classcounterparts participated in noncompetitive activities, often in theirhomes. Children’s tournaments, especially athletic ones, came first to poorchildren—often immigrants—living in big cities.

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

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

What are the social forces that have shaped the evolution of these children’scompetitive activities from roughly the turn of the twentieth century up to thepresent? The answer is linked to major changes in three social institutions: thefamily, the educational system, and the organization of competition and prizes.This chapter provides a history of the development of competitive children’sactivities in the United States. To illustrate this history, I examine theevolution 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 importantconsequences for families and the economy. With the institution of mandatoryschooling children experienced a profound shift in the structure of their dailylives, especially in the social organization of their time. Compulsory educationbrought leisure time into focus; since “school time” was delineated asobligatory, “free time” could now be identified as well.

What to do with this free time? The question was on the minds of parents, socialworkers, and “experts” who doled out advice on child rearing. The answer laypartly in competitive sports leagues, which started to evolve to hold theinterest of children, the first phase in the development of children’scompetitive activities. Overall we can identify three key periods ofdevelopment: the first runs from the Progressive Era through World War II; thesecond moves from the postwar period to the 1970s; and the third takes us fromthe 1980s into the present.

Seeds of Competition: Progressive Era to World War II

The Progressive Era, with its organizational and reform impulses, inevitablyfocused on children’s lives. These impulses gave rise to some of the earliestorganized competitive events among American children. For example, reformersconcerned about the health of babies started “better baby” contests in 1908 as away to teach primarily immigrant and lower-class mothers the values of hygieneand nutrition. The contests were often held at state fairs, where judgesevaluated children along several dimensions, including measurements andappearance, 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 mandatoryschooling and laws restricting child labor, worry mounted over the idle hoursof children, which many assumed would be filled with delinquent or self-destructiveactivities. Urban reformers were particularly preoccupied with poorimmigrant boys who, because of overcrowding in tenements, were often on thestreets.

Reformers’ focus was less on age-specific activities and more generally on”removing urban children from city streets.” Initial efforts focused on theestablishment of parks and playgrounds, and powerful, organized playgroundmovements developed in New York City and Boston. But because adults “did nottrust city boys to play unsupervised,” attention soon shifted to organizedsports.

Sports were seen as important in teaching the “American” values of cooperation,hard work, and respect for authority. Progressive reformers thought athleticactivities could prepare children for the “new industrial society that wasemerging,” which would require them to be physical laborers. Organized youthgroups such as the YMCA took on the responsibility of providing children withsports activities.

In 1903 New York City’s Public School Athletic League for Boys (PSAL) wasestablished, and formal contests between children, organized by adults, emergedas a way to keep the boys coming back to activities, clubs, and school. Formalcompetition ensured the boys’ continued participation since they wanted todefend their team’s record and honor. Luther Gulick, founder of the PSAL,thought, “Group loyalty becomes team loyalty, and team loyalty enhances schoolloyalty, for the spirit of loyalty and morality demonstrated publicly spreads toall the students, not just those who compete.”

A girls’ league within the PSAL was founded in 1905, though many of thecombative and competitive elements present in the boys’ league wereeliminated. In 1914 the New York version became part of the city’s Board ofEducation. By 1910 seventeen other cities across the United States had formedtheir 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, alsogrew in popularity at this time. Spelling bees, known historically as spellingfights or spelling parties, are an American folk tradition. Throughout theeighteenth century they were part of the typical Colonial education, and by thenineteenth century they had developed into community social events. By theturn of the twentieth century spelling bees had evolved into a competitiveeducational tool. In her history of American childhood from 1850 to 1950Priscilla Ferguson Clement explains, “Individual competition was also a constantin [late] nineteenth-century schools. In rural areas, teachers held weeklyspelling bees in which youngsters stood in a line before the teacher (toed theline) 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 anational 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 nextnational student spelling bee was not held again until the 1920s. By 1925 thenational student spelling bee as we know it, complete with corporatesponsorship, had taken shape.

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

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

By the 1930s this pattern began to shift as a consequence of the GreatDepression and as educational philosophies changed. During the Depression, manyclubs with competitive leagues suffered financially and had to close, so poorerchildren from urban areas began to lose sites for competitive athletic contestsorganized 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 thatwould soon formally institute national competitive tournaments for young kids,for a price. National pay-to-play organizations, such as Pop Warner Football andLittle League Baseball, came into being in 1929 and 1939, respectively.

At the same time, many physical education professionals stopped supportingathletic competition for children because of worries that leagues supportedcompetition only for the best athletes, leaving the others behind. Concernsabout focusing on only the most talented athletes developed into questions aboutthe harmfulness of competition. Historian Susan Miller explains: “Basketball,like all team sports, came under fire for a flaw that no amount of rule changescould rectify; critics charged that they inherently encouraged unnecessary andpotentially harmful competition…. Critics argued that team sports put toomuch focus on winning at the expense of good sportsmanship and thus encouragedthe rise of star athletes instead of fostering full participation by all teammembers.”

In the end this meant that much of the organized youth competition left theschool system. But it did not leave American childhood. “By allowing highlyorganized children’s sport to leave the educational context,” Jack Berryman, amedical historian, explains, “professional educators presented a goldenopportunity to the many voluntary youth-related groups in America.” Theconcatenation of concerns about competition and the financial realities of theDepression created an environment wherein organized, competitive, pay-to-playactivities for kids would flourish outside of the school system in places likePop Warner and Little League.

Overall during this “seeds of competition” period a transformation occurred bothin the time spent in organized competition and in the types of children whoparticipated in these activities. Earlier in the century, affluent childrenparticipated in personal growth activities where they did not encounter muchorganized competition, as the activities were more than anything a form ofsocial grooming. But with the development of national compulsory schooling therehad to be a way to distinguish the achievements of children from differentclasses. (Not surprisingly the 1930s also saw the development of giftedprograms, and in 1941 the Hunter College Campus for the Gifted was founded inNew York City.) As school became more competitive, so too did the timechildren spent outside of school—particularly for those from upwardly mobilefamilies.

Growth of Competition: Postwar to the 1970s

During this period competitive children’s activities experienced “explosivegrowth” in terms of the number of activities available and the number ofparticipants. In the de cades following World War II a variety of competitiveactivities began to be dominated by children of the middle class. As theactivities became more organized, competition intensified within the middleclass.

One of the first children’s activities to become nationally organized in acompetitive way, and certainly one of the most well-known and successful youthsports programs, is Little League Baseball. After its creation in 1939 theLeague held its first World Series only a decade later, in 1949. In the ensuingyears Little League experienced a big expansion in the number of participants,including participants from around the world. As this model of children’smembership in a national league organization developed, fees to playincreased.

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

The self-esteem movement focused on building up children’s confidence andtalents without being negative or comparing them to others. As the movement didnot reach outside activities, such as sports, private organizations rushed tofill the void. Parents increasingly wanted more competitive opportunities fortheir children and were willing to pay for it.

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

An often overlooked event in the history of children’s sports, and especiallycompetitive sports, is the passage of the Amateur Sports Act in 1978. Thiscongressional bill established the U.S. Olympic Committee, largely taking awaythe function of the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU). Born out of the Cold War andthe desire to defeat the USSR in sports, the U.S. Olympic Committee broughttogether the national governing bodies for each Olympic sport. The AAU had tofind a new function; over the next two decades they transformed themselves intoa powerful force in the organization of children’s competitive sports, servingas a national organization overseeing a variety of children’s competitivesports, such as swimming and volleyball.

Nonathletic competitions for children also began to take off in this timeperiod. One example is child beauty pageants. The oldest continuously runningchild beauty pageant in the United States, Our Little Miss, started in 1961.This pageant was modeled on an adult system, the Miss America Pageant, withlocal and regional competitions followed by a national contest. Throughout the1960s and 1970s child beauty pageants began “mushrooming at an unbelievably fastrate.” By the late 1970s there was even a media-recognized “pageant circuit.”A 1977 Chicago Tribune story reported, “Youngsters who travel the circuit learnhow to fill the bill wherever they are, acting naïve and spontaneous here andknocking them dead with vampiness there.”

Whether the yardstick was academics, athletics, or appearance, by the 1970sparents (mostly those who were educated and upwardly mobile) wanted theirchildren to “be better than average in all things, so they tried to provide themwith professionally run activities that would enrich their minds, tone theirbodies, inculcate physical skills, and enhance their self-esteem.” Nationalorganizations went along with this impulse to be better than average byinstituting national guidelines and contests. Even programs that had aphilosophy of “everyone plays,” such as the American Youth Soccer Organization(discussed more below), joined the competitive fray by hosting eliminationtournaments where there was only one victor. These competitions began to begeared to children of younger and younger ages.
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