activities and how much is at stake for the adults who are involved.
CHANGES IN FAMILIES, EDUCATION, AND PRIZES
What factors explain why competitive activities like chess, dance, and soccer have developed in the way they have over the past century? In addition to the trends described above, I have identified three more macrohistorical trends to help clarify how we got to the point where adults lie about the age of children: changes in the America family, the American educational system, and the organization of prizes and competitions in American culture. Class is an important factor as well, overlaying the historical narrative and influencing the contemporary situation and its outcomes.
In Busier Than Ever!, their study of why American families are so busy in the early twenty-first century, anthropologists Darrah, Freeman, and English-Lueck suggest, “Smaller family sizes, the reluctance of parents to permit unsupervised children’s play, and preferences for structured, formalized children’s activities require adults to transport and supervise their children. Many parents have also become more involved in their children’s education and recreational activities reflecting shifting norms of good parenting.”88 Embedded in these reasons for the increase in busyness are some of the reasons for the increase in competition in children’s lives.
Demographic changes, such as fewer children in each family, profoundly affect the tenor of parenting. Parents can devote more time and attention to their children in smaller families; this also means that there is even more parental anxiety since there are fewer chances to see children succeed.89 More mothers now work outside the home as well, which affects child care arrangements. For many mothers, employment can produce parental guilt, as some delegation of socialization tasks must occur. This in turn may lead parents to indulge children in their competitive or organized activities more than they might have otherwise or to overcompensate for less physical time at home by being overinvolved in other ways.
Likely the most significant demographic change that has affected competitive children’s activities is the population booms: the Baby Boom and its Echo Boom. While Baby Boom parents have been the best-educated and wealthiest generation ever seen in the United States, that enormous cohort has overwhelmed every social-sorting institution it has come in contact with, from preschool classrooms to retirement homes.90 Hence the cultural experience of competition, of an insufficient supply of spots for the size of the group seeking them, has predisposed Boomers to see life as a series of contests. With their children’s cohort, the Echo Boom, if anything the competitive landscape is getting more crowded than it was in the Boomers’ formative years, and the stakes are even higher.
This is especially true when it comes to higher education. The 1960s saw “a growing competitive frenzy over college admissions as a badge of parental fulfillment.”91 Parental anxiety reached a new level because the surge in attendance by Boomers had strained college facilities, and it became increasingly clear that the top schools could not keep up with the demand, meaning that students might not be admitted to the level of college they expected, given their class background. This became even more problematic with the rise of coeducation and the nationalization and democratization of the applicant pool,92 fueled by the GI Bill, recruiting, and technology that produced better information for applicants. Parents took on the responsibility of ensuring that their children were successful in the college admissions process.
Interestingly, the competitive frenzy over college admissions did not abate in the 1970s and 1980s, when it was actually easier to gain admission to college, given the decline in application numbers after the Baby Boomers. Instead, more aware of the stakes, families became more competitive.93
With the Echo Boom in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it once again became harder to get into a “top” college.94 It is not just that there has been an increase in the college-age population, expected to have peaked in most areas by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century,95 but there have been record numbers of applications to the most elite colleges and universities. The years 2009–2013 brought record applicant pools for Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, and Brown.96
This reality, combined with the existing tension around college admissions, has created an incredibly competitive atmosphere for families, which starts at younger and younger ages now, as parents start earlier and earlier in their children’s lives on the long march to college admission. How early one starts seems to be related to class position. In some parts of the country some parents with higher class standing start grooming their children for competitive preschool admissions, setting their children on an Ivy League track from early on.97
After-school activities are a crucial supplement to in-school achievement and test scores. Performing well in activities that many parents perceive as integral to, but not entirely synonymous with, the formal educational system is seen as crucial. Why? Children can develop Competitive Kid Capital through their participation, which can be translated into the currency of credentials. Certain sports, such as squash and fencing, are especially helpful, as they signal elite status in the college admissions process.98
For those who wonder just why competitive children’s activities are so much more developed and organized in the United States than in other parts of the world, look no further than this admissions practice. While American society’s cultural attitude toward competition is more developed as well, the best structural explanation is that universities take participation in organized activities into account when making admissions decisions. Most of the other top systems of higher education in the world (in Japan, South Korea, China, India, and France, for example) rely on standardized test scores to determine admissions. It is a purely numeric enterprise. Of course, this carries its own stresses and problems for students, but academic performance is the main focus.
Parents know that academic credentials matter. Sociologist Randall Collins explained their importance this way: “The rise of a competitive system for producing an abstract cultural currency in the form of educational credentials has been the major new force shaping stratification in twentieth-century America.”99 As I previously mentioned, this new stratification connected to existing inequalities based on class.
The rise of competitive activities for children is tied to another major change in the educational system: the rise of compulsory education. As Viviana Zelizer carefully details in the classic Pricing the Priceless Child, the rise of compulsory education coupled with the eradication of child labor coincided with a cultural shift in how children were viewed. Even as they became less economically vital to families, children became emotionally priceless.100 Starting in the early twentieth century, parents began to invest more and more in their children, just as they started to have fewer kids, which made the children they did have even more important. This sacralization of childhood helped contribute to the fetishization of childhood and childhood accomplishments.
In many ways it is no coincidence that during this time America experienced a fetishization of awards and prizes in general. The winner-take-all prize frenzy that characterizes American culture started around the same time. For instance, the late nineteenth century saw the establishment of several different types of competitions that still exist today. In 1874 the first Kentucky Derby was held, and 1877 witnessed the inaugural Westminster dog show.101 More than animals got in on the act: in 1913 the first rose competitions were held in the United States.102
The early twentieth century also saw the development of organized American sporting culture. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) was established in 1910, and a variety of professional sports leagues grew during this time. Less popular sports also developed their organized, competitive infrastructures in this historical moment; for example, the first synchronized swimming competition in the United States took place in 1939.103 Social scientists Andrei Markovits and Steven Hellerman note that sports foster Americans’ predilection for rankings and quantifications, a huge part of the sporting
