that Josh and Marla have chosen activities to provide complementary skills for their son. “The team aspect in soccer is essential,” Josh notes. “People work together [on the field]. . . . And it’s not at all like that in chess because when you’re competing as a chess player, you’re not working with other teammates, you’re essentially working on your own.”
Marla listed a different set of skills she thinks Jeremiah derives from competitive chess: “Chess really helps with and reinforces the capacity to focus and concentrate. It’s also amazing in terms of what it imbues a child with—strategic thinking, advance planning, and awareness of consequences.”
Josh and Marla think that these skills—teamwork, focus, and strategic thinking—are of great value in adult life. Even though the biggest tournament of all, the college admissions process, is ten years off for Jeremiah, they think about it frequently. Jeremiah’s prospects are good, Josh reflects: “[Our daughter] got someplace good, so even more I feel like Jeremiah will get something good because he’s going to be a high achiever or an overachiever.”
“I’m realizing I have very high expectations for Jeremiah,” Marla adds. “I mean I’m his mom, but he’s really, really smart, and he excels at school.” She went on, “He’s very self-driven, and so I feel like that’s going to propel him through life and if he’s lucky, and remains well, I could imagine him pursuing college and then a graduate degree, and some kind of exceptional work in what ever career he chooses.”
They know just how competitive the world can be because Marla and Josh are the survivors of many tournaments themselves. “Well, I mean I’m a Baby Boomer kid,” Marla notes. “There’s just such a [huge] population. Then my kids are Baby Boom-lets, so there’s just a crunch of less resources and a lot of people. So that’s partly the reason for the competition.” She continued, “You know, as I got older there was always a sense that you’ve got to have a lot of stuff you’re doing, your extracurriculars were meant to be strong. But it just didn’t start as young.”
THE COMPETITIVENESS OF AMERICAN FAMILY LIFE
Why have competition and “extracurriculars” taken hold for such young children, and why are busy families, like Jeremiah’s, devoting so much time to them? Like the other middle- and upper-middle-class parents behind the swinging doors of the chess tournaments, Josh and Marla are affluent and educated, working full-time jobs while also shuttling their kids to tryouts for all-star teams, regional and national tournaments, and countless evening and weekend practices. Many of these families need to outsource to keep up—Marla and Josh have had a nanny for years—especially since they live far away from grandparents and other family members. Family meals take place on the go, in the backseat of moving cars, or not at all.3 As the parental “second shift” continues to grow,4 alongside it a second shift for children has emerged, which is suffused with competition rather than mere participation.
That American families are busy is not surprising. A book by a team of anthropologists, Busier Than Ever!, makes the case that American families, especially those with two working parents, have never before had so many obligations outside of the home.5 Time-use studies yield similar results, finding that parents work more hours outside of the home and children spend more time in organized settings than in previous American generations.6 More children than ever are also “hurried,” participating in three or more organized activities per week or in a single activity for four hours or more over two days.7
Ethnographic work on family life affirms this finding, documenting, in particular, middle-class families racing from work to children’s classes and practices to home, repeating this cycle day after day. Sociologist Julia Wrigley found that “children had no friends to play with in the neighborhood, because [the other] children were all off at classes.”8 Anthropologist Marjorie Goodwin explains, “Increasingly middle class parents are going to extraordinary lengths to foster their children’s talents through maintaining a hectic schedule of organized leisure activities.”9
But it’s not just that middle-class children spend their time in organized activities. What is critical, and rarely discussed, is the competitive nature of their extracurricular lives. The Tallingers, one of the case studies in Annette Lareau’s seminal work on childhood socialization that finds that class trumps race in terms of parenting strategies, had sons who were members of several travel and elite soccer teams.10 Lareau highlights the organized and interactive experiences middle-class parents construct for their children, such as constantly talking with them and encouraging them to question adults in a variety of institutional settings. She calls this parenting style “concerted cultivation.”
But little is made of this competitive element in Lareau’s Unequal Childhoods. She does not discuss the powerful presence of competition in children’s lives or the emphasis their parents place on acquiring a competitive spirit.11 Playing to Win both updates Lareau’s findings and extends them, looking deeply at an important but previously unexamined component of concerted cultivation by examining one of the most intriguing examples of today’s intensive parenting: competitive after-school activities for elementary school–age children.
The popular media have certainly picked up on the increase in competition for young children, and the conflicts that often ensue. Recall the Disney Pixar movie The Incredibles and the media coverage of it, focused on deconstructing the line “Everyone’s special. . . . Which is another way of saying no one is,” along with numerous news stories on parents’ sometimes criminal misbehavior on the sidelines of kids’ sporting activities. But no one has systematically examined the structure, content, and potential consequences of competition, particularly for young children.
I argue that it is this organized, competitive element, outside of the home, that is key to understanding middle- and upper-middle-class family life. Parents worry that if their children do not participate in childhood tournaments they will fall behind in the tournament of life. While it’s not clear if the parents are correct, what matters is that they believe that they are and act accordingly. Their beliefs about the future shape their actions in the present when it comes to their children’s competitive after-school activities.
STUDYING KIDS AND COMPETITION
What exactly do I mean by “competitive childhood activities”? In Playing to Win competitive children’s activities are defined as organized activities run by adults, where records are kept and prizes are given out. There is a continuum of competitive experiences in childhood. For instance, sandbox play is at one extreme, on the left-hand side of the continuum. The activities featured in Playing to Win are to the right of center for sure. But they are not at the right-hand extreme, as these kids, for the most part, are not elites; in fact most of their parents explicitly don’t want their children to be “professionals” in chess, dance, or soccer.
Children’s competitive activities can be classified into one of the following types: athletic, artistic, or academic. My case studies consist of one of each: soccer, dance,12 and chess. As one of the most popular youth team sports, with over 3 million children registered each year by U.S. Youth Soccer, soccer was a natural choice. Competitive dance has also grown by leaps and bounds, with competitive dance numbers estimated to be in the mid-six figures.13 Dance has experienced a resurgence since the rebirth of dance on television with such shows as So You Think You Can Dance (which highlights many “competition kids”) and Dancing with the Stars (with a few seasons featuring a “ballroom kids” competition). Finally, each winter and spring thousands of elementary school–age students sign up for the national chess championships, in addition to competing at local weekend tournaments. In the past decade scholastic membership in the United States Chess Federation (USCF) has nearly doubled in size, now accounting for a little more than
