Today’s post is the FIRST in the Brilliant Book Club for Parents! I am joining several parent bloggers in reflecting on Hilary Levey Friedman’s Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture. We’d love for you to join the conversation on our blogs, on our Facebook page, or on Twitter using #BrilliantBookClub. We will continue reading and discussing the book throughout October, too.
In the first few chapters, Levey Friedman considers the reasons parents encourage their children to join competitive activities, specifically soccer, chess, and dance. I have been especially intrigued by this book, as my daughter participates {recreationally} in both soccer and dance. And I was a competitive gymnast while growing up, and I currently participate in recreational, performance, and competitive dance.
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Remember that scene in The Breakfast Club, when the kids finally reveal why they have been sentenced to Saturday Detention? Wrestler Andrew {Emilio Estevez} describes how he beat up a weaker athlete, and reveals that he did it to please his father, who tolerates no weakness. “You’ve got to be number one! I won’t tolerate any losers in this family! … Win! Win! Win!”
{Andrew’s reflection begins at about 3:00. Warning: includes profanity, in case your kids are in the room!}
I kept thinking about this scene while reading and reflecting on the reasons I have enrolled my children in dance, soccer, gymnastics, track, and other activities.
Levey Friedman’s central argument is that parents enter their children in competitive activities to boost their Competitive Kid Capital. Cultural capital, she writes, “captures the skills, knowledge, and education that confer advantage” in a particular cultural context. The parents that Levey Friedman interviewed repeatedly emphasized that America is a competitive culture, and therefore, they need to teach their children how to compete. Specifically, she identifies five aspects of Competitive Kid Capital that parents are hoping to inculcate in their children:
- internalizing the importance of winning
- bouncing back from a loss to win in the future
- learning how to perform within time limits
- learning how to succeed in stressful situations
- being able to perform under the gaze of others.
These, according to the parents in Levey Friedman’s study, are essential components of the formula for success for children in our culture.
The I.V. League?
But sadly, the definition of “success” for most of these parents is admission to an Ivy League school. Levey Friedman writes, “Many [parents] were quite explicit about the direct link they perceive between these childhood competitive activities and elite college attendance.” Colleges want students with ambition, and participation in competitive activities, Levey Friedman argues, is a proxy for that ambition, which can be harder to quantify in a college application.
photo credit: Chaval Brasil via photopin cc
Parents, with children still in elementary school, already dream of Harvard and Stanford.
This emphasis on elite college admission makes me so sad. I see this drive so often among my Advanced Placement students, who have their hearts set on just a handful of the over 2000 institutions of higher learning in this country, because of the cache of the Ivy League “brand.”
In fact, I once had a student, who clearly had heard all about these schools, write about them unwittingly as the “I.V. League.”
I remember thinking how apt a description that was. It’s like the message that only a few colleges really matter gets mainlined into our children’s veins at a young age, so that by the time they get to high school, they are convinced that their academic and cultural value will only be confirmed by admission to one of these coveted institutions. There are literally thousands of colleges that will prepare them for a successful life and career.
Why Participate? Why Compete?
Do children have to learn to compete in order to succeed?
These chapters made me ponder why I am enrolling my children in various sports. At this time, they are not competing, but every activity they participate in right now could eventually lead to competitive events. Levey Friedman points out that by the time children are in high school, competitive participation is often the only option.
I feel it is important for my children to be involved in activities. The reasons I want them to be involved in athletics are:
- to be physically active and healthy
- to learn the value of teamwork
- to learn the importance of practice and hard work to achieve a goal
- to experience victory with grace, and failure with determination to improve
Some of these reasons are similar to the concept of Competitive Kid Capital. But I think these can also be accomplished through participation, rather than solely through competition. Or can’t the competition be about making oneself better, not proving oneself better than others? At least on the surface, reasons like performing under stress, or time limits, or the gaze of others, hadn’t been part of my decision.
And certainly preparing them for elite college admissions was never part of the plan.
But this made me think about the difference between manifest and latent functions. Manifest functions are the explicitly stated reasons for our actions {as I listed above.} The latent functions are unintended, or even unknown, by the actors, and are identified by observers, like anthropologists or sociologists.
And maybe, though I am not fully aware of it, part of me is encouraging my children to participate in sports, and possibly competitions, because the concept of Competitive Kid Capital has been surreptitiously administered to me via I.V. {was that what was in the I.V. in the hospital while I was in labor?}. While I say my children are doing this to keep their heart rates up, am I really doing it because I have my heart set on their ability to make it in a competitive culture? Is it because I don’t want them to fall behind?
Being Mindful of our Actions
I want to be mindful and aware of the reasons for my decisions and actions.
I don’t want to be the parent described by Andrew in The Breakfast Club, pushing my kids to Be Number One! To Win!
But I do think there are important benefits to participating in competitive sports.
I feel I learned a lot through competing in gymnastics for several years.
photo credit: Raphael Goetter via photopin cc
I learned time management. I learned about sportsmanship ~ about congratulating others on their victories, and accepting where I needed to improve. I learned about the value of hard work to pursue an important goal.
This summer, my daughter {age 6} participated in a track event sponsored by the high school track team. She placed LAST in the 200-meter. She wasn’t even close. As we left the stadium, through her tears she told me that she would NEVER run again. As I wrote in a previous post, I went all Brene Brown on her, telling her that she was brave for stepping into the arena. Some kids may choose to not run at all, but she ran, and even when she knew she would lose, she kept going.
And the next week, she ran the race again.
She didn’t win, but she didn’t cry. I praised her for getting back into the arena.
And that IS an important life skill. For me, Competitive Kid Capital isn’t about getting her into an elite college. I want her to dare greatly, even though she may fail. I want her to learn to bounce back from that failure. I want her to learn to balance her time among the variety of activities, optional and compulsory, that life requires. Ultimately, I want her to find the activities that spark her passion. I don’t want it to be about WINNING or about the trophy.
Where does what I want for my children end, and what the culture dictates begin? How many of these reasons are based on my values, and how many are based on the competitive culture that flows through my veins? It’s probably not possible to know.
More Questions Than Answers
In the emails the Brilliant Book Club members and I shared prior to today’s post, we noticed how many questions this book raised for us, which I think is truly the mark of a good book. And while left-brain me is often uncomfortable with questions-not-answers, I’ll leave you with the questions I am now pondering…
Should our children become specialists in a particular area of expertise? Is that too much pressure?
But if our children remain generalists, or “Renaissance People,” will they become a jack-of-all-trades, yet a master of none?
If we don’t teach our children to compete, what will happen to them?
Is there an I.V. injection to inoculate us from the negative side effects of our competitive culture?
I hope I have more answers for you for our next post. Please join us on October 28th for our second, and final, post about Playing to Win!
Maybe These Ladies Have Some Answers….
In the meantime, you can read the posts from my fellow Brilliant Book Club bloggers!
Deb of Urban Moo Cow: “How Harmful Is a Culture of Winning at All Costs?”
Jessica of School of Smock: “In Praise of Parenting…Like a Sociologist?”
Lauren of Omnimom: “Playing to Play (and Not to Get into College)”
Stephanie of Mommy, for Real: “From Little League to The Ivy League?”
- A Mindful Approach to New Year’s Resolutions - January 13, 2020
- Just This Next Step - December 16, 2019
- WAIT: A Mindfulness Practice for Waiting in Line - December 9, 2019
