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.”27
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.”28 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.)29 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.30 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.31
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.32
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.33
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.34 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.”35 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.”36
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.”37 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.38
Some observers have argued that the rise of these adult-organized competitive activities for children can partly be explained by the decrease in safe areas for children to play on their own.39 While there is some validity to this argument, as safe play space for children in both urban and suburban areas was declining, this argument does not explain the trend toward increased competition because there was an alternative to the competitive path. As upwardly mobile parents clamored to have their children involved in competitive activities that would brand them as “above average,” adults involved with less advantaged children focused on inclusiveness. Those involved with “preventing such youngsters from being lured into gangs, drug use, and other antisocial behavior, steered children into organized activities sponsored by churches, schools, YMCAs and YWCAs, and Boys’ and Girls’ clubs.”40 In these inclusive clubs, participation and not competition was the norm.
So the same YMCAs and Boys’ clubs that had been the first movers in organized competition several decades before now moved in the opposite direction. The activities provided were still organized by adults, but little of the tournament impulse remained. Instead, these children’s better-off peers were now the competitive ones, working to ensure their privileged positions in numerous activities organized at a national level. As the price of such competitive success continued to increase—even for young children—many less advantaged children were pushed out of the competitive space.
EXPLOSION OF HYPERCOMPETITIVENESS: 1980S TO THE PRESENT
Since the 1980s it is not only the costs of participation in competitive children’s activities that have grown, but also the level of professionalization. As more children compete in more activities for more money at higher levels, the result over the past three decades has been the growth of hypercompetition. In addition, the distance between middle-class children and others continues to grow within the same activities as middle-class
