Many explanations for the continued growth of organized activities during this time focus on increases in maternal employment: with both parents outside of the home in the after-school hours, children need to be supervised. But competitive activities—particularly the most common ones for elementary school–age kids, which take place outside of the school system—actually create additional work for parents and take time away from other house hold tasks.42 Parents have to make sure uniforms and other equipment are clean and ready and shuttle kids to various lessons, practices, and tournaments. (This is especially true in the suburbs, where children’s play space is largely physically limited to areas reachable by car, but it is also true in many urban settings as parents worry about children’s safety if they play alone, even though kidnapping rates are down.)43
Competitive activities not only produce more work for parents; they also create many work-like elements for children.44 Parents and children often use work language to describe kids’ participation. For example, it is common when a successful child quits an activity to say that he or she has “retired.”
It is not a stretch to say that many young athletes and performers are now young professionals. There are three specific ways in which children’s competitive youth sports have become professionalized since the 1980s:45 (1) the development of highly hierarchical divisions within youth activities, (2) the rise of the full-time paid coach, and (3) the ascendancy of the year-round season.
The development of elite programs (which includes travel, select, premier, all-star, and Olympic development programs) across activities intensified during the 1990s.46 There are now many stratified categories of organized play, ranging from recreational up to elite.47 Children usually have to work their way up through these divisions, with the goal being the top level team or organization in their geographic area. This system often tries to model itself on professional sports leagues, with club owners seeing recreational leagues as farm systems for the development of elite or pro players. Needless to say, these programs exist outside of the school system. This is true even for activities like spelling bees, which would seem to have to exist within the school system, but between homeschooled children and kids looking for their version of mental athletics, private bees are beginning to develop as well.48
The AAU illustrates the recent development of more and more hierarchical, competitive activities. Currently there are over a million participants in AAU sports. In 1995 the AAU had about 100 national championships, most for kids over twelve. By 2008 it held more than 250 national championships in which “a total of 1900 group champions are crowned, starting around age 6. More often, these tournaments begin at age 8.”49 Less than twenty years ago eight was the age when kids started participating in recreational youth sports. Now kids routinely vie for national titles at that age.
Of course these kids need coaches with high levels of expertise to help them reach those national championships. Enter the paid youth sport coach and other specialized trainers, who reinforce the professionalization of youth sports and activities.50 Parent and volunteer coaches now often exist only in recreational leagues, and some elite clubs and organizations explicitly forbid parents from having any coaching responsibilities. When a team must pay for full-time coaches or trainers, who often charge over $20,000 for a season, the costs outstrip the budgets of all but the wealthiest families. And of course, now that adults can make a living from youth sports, they must continue to justify their employment, so they strive to increase the number of professional markers for these children’s activities.
One such marker is the third way youth sports have become professionalized: the rise of the year-round season.51 In the past, for example, soccer dominated the fall, basketball the winter, and baseball the spring. Now, at the competitive level, teams practice all year—much like the pros—often requiring a permanent annual commitment from families.52 With indoor training facilities and specialized camps held during school vacations, children are asked as early as age eight to commit to a single sport. This has the consequence of forcing children to specialize early.
At the same time the number of competitors at the highest levels has increased, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, as the rewards for winning have also increased. Gymnastics and figure skating are good examples, as detailed by Joan Ryan in her 2000 book Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, which describes the efforts of young girls and their families to fight time and puberty in an attempt to reach the Olympics in their respective sports. Ryan details how more and more families pushed their daughters into elite competition, often moving across the country to work with particular coaches. She describes one father, Bill Bragg, who actually gave up custody of his daughter to her figure skating coach, hoping that would help young Hollie become an Olympic ice princess. Ryan explains his motivation:
Bragg himself had been a swimming coach, but swimming held no magic. It couldn’t turn milkmaids into princesses. To him, skating was more than a sport. To succeed in skating was to succeed in life. It was a road to riches and recognition, and perhaps more important, it was a road to respectability. Skating offered a life of restaurants with cloth napkins, hotels with marble lobbies, a life where a girl from the wrong side of the tracks could be somebody.53
Other competitive sports and activities also come with promises of riches and recognition, particularly in the form of endorsements. This is another reason hypercompetition has started to permeate children’s activities and promoted competition for younger and younger children. A 2003 New York Times Magazine piece focused on four-year-old champion skateboarder Dylan, who already was being touted as the “next big little thing” by promoters, merchandisers, and his parents.54
Even in historically established sports, such as golf, young children who succeed competitively garner publicity, attention, and hence money. Twelve-year-old Alexis “Lexi” Thompson made headlines in the summer of 2007 when she became the youngest qualifier ever for the U.S. Women’s Open in golf. Touted as the next “pre-teen prodigy,” Alexis began fielding endorsement deals. At age sixteen, in December 2011, she became the youngest ever winner of an LPGA tournament—while wearing sponsor attire.
This proclivity for naming children prodigies, another element of hypercompetition, happens even more often in music. In a 2000 book that highlights the young string students who attend Julliard’s Saturday pre-college program, music writer Barbara Sand explains that parents and students are so anxious to get and keep a “prodigy” label that they will often lie about a child’s age.55 Being named a prodigy (defined as a child who displays “talents that are only supposed to be the province of gifted and highly trained adults”) confers status, but also money and attention.56
With so many competitive circuits available, high performers almost expect to be declared prodigies. By the 1980s, middle-class parents presumed their children to be above average,57 and expectations have only increased since then. Indeed since the 1980s we have seen the development of complex, competitive circuits in a variety of activities that previously had a much smaller competitive element.
Cheerleading is a good example of the growth of complex, competitive circuits. Cheerleading has a long history in this country, starting with men as the first participants in the late nineteenth century. Women became cheerleaders in the 1920s and have dominated the activity since then, with a few exceptions (for example, yell leaders at Texas A&M are still all male). Cheerleading has often been associated with small-town local pride, national patriotism, and school promotion.58 A few scholastic-based competitions were held for older cheerleading squads—at the high school and collegiate level—in the growth-of-competition period. In 1981 a national organization, the United Cheer Association, organized its own private cheerleading competition.59 But in the 1990s private, competition-only squads, tied to neither scholastic nor civic identities, began to emerge as a variety of private cheer competitions started. Now such teams as
