It’s the last Monday of the month, so it’s time for the Brilliant Book Club! We’re continuing our discussion of Hilary Levey Friedman’s Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture.
You can read the posts from my fellow Book Club Bloggers here:
Deb of Urban Moo Cow: “Playing to Win but Thinking for Yourself”
Jessica of School of Smock: “From Strong Girls to ‘Maxed Out’ Women”
Stephanie of Mommy, For Real: “The Intersection of Competition, Friendship, and Fun”
And stay tuned at the end of this post for the announcement of our book selection for November!
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I guess I’m a bit of an anomaly. When we chose Playing to Win as our first Brilliant Book Club selection, I tweeted this:
Technically, I am both a Soccer Mom and a Dance Mom. But I’ve made no secret of the fact that if I had to choose, I would be a Dance Mom. No question. Evidence from another tweet:
And this also makes me an anomaly, for in Levey Friedman’s research, it was the Soccer Moms who had attended elite colleges, had advanced degrees, professional jobs, and lots of credentials. The Dance Moms were “lower status” and primarily from working- and lower-middle-class backgrounds. And many wanted their daughters to become teachers. The Soccer Moms wanted their daughters to become professionals. The Dance Moms wanted their girls to go to college, but Levey Friedman surmises it’s to obtain the MRS. degree. Hmmm….
In my last post about Playing to Win, I addressed the reasons why parents decide to enroll their children in potentially competitive activities. Levey Friedman argues that parents hope that competitive sports will teach their children the skills and dispositions necessary for success in our culture: learning to win, to bounce back from failure, and to perform under pressure. She contends that there are further differences, based on gender, for the particular activities that parents select for their children.
For girls who were in competitive dance, the parents valued teaching their daughters to be graceful and feminine. They saw their daughters as learning poise and posture through an activity that emphasized physical appearance. It is also a more “feminine” form of competition – there’s no direct physical contact, girls are encouraged to cheer for other dancers, and all teams are recognized through an adjudication system of scoring.
Parents of girls in soccer, on the other hand, wanted their girls to be aggressive and assertive. Levey Friedman hypothesized that these parents, who themselves had gone through competitive credentialing systems, wanted their girls to be able to compete in similar situations.
And this has made me wonder, why do I like being a Dance Mom? Why have I enrolled my daughter in dance?
Certainly, my preferences and experience are a big part of it. I was a competitive gymnast for several years, and I currently dance in several performance groups. It’s an activity that I love. {And I always get complements on my posture. Seriously.}
Soccer stresses me out. Soccer Moms stress me out. I can’t stand the yelling from the sidelines, the constant coaching of their girls. That doesn’t happen in dance or gymnastics. Dance Moms watch from a window in the hallway, or not at all, during practice. We talk about things like Halloween costumes or head lice outbreaks or how to get a baby to sleep through the night. We don’t critique our daughters or yell at each other or demand that the teacher recognize the innate talent of our child.
How strange that in popular culture, the Soccer Mom is the suburban, minivan-driving, quietly sacrificing all of herself for her family mother, and the Dance Mom is the out-of-control, nasty, in-your-face, trash-talking selfish mother. If soccer is the new and assertive model of femininity, and dance is the traditional and graceful model, why are the Soccer Moms so old-fashioned, and the Dance Moms so radically aggressive?
I like that my daughter is a dancer. I believe she is learning grace and poise. She is learning how to move her body, and express herself creatively. One of her favorite things to do at home is put on music and just dance. I think that’s wonderful.
I also think she is learning valuable lessons from soccer. My husband coached her soccer team this fall, and one of the things he constantly told the girls was “Be aggressive! Attack the ball!” My daughter can run and move, but she is very hesitant to get into the thick of things and make plays. I like that she is learning to be more assertive.
And I love that soccer is something she can share with her father. Levey Friedman notes that the rise of competitive girls’ activities has provided “an opportunity for fathers and daughters to interact in a way that previously was reserved for fathers and sons.”
Which leads me to my son. He just turned four, so he hasn’t been in many activities. He took swimming lessons this summer, and he has taken gymnastics classes. His gymnastics session just ended, and he has informed me that he wants to do dance like his big sister.
Holding the ubiquitous participation ribbon.
He loves going to dance class with me. He’ll push his chair right up against the window and watch the girls tap and twirl and leap. He’ll turn to me and say, “Where are the boys? Boys can do dance, too, if they want.”
“You’re right,” I tell him.
In fact, he is signed up for dance classes starting next week. His father and I both agree that dance will be good for him: he’ll learn to move his body and be active. He’s a little guy ~ at his four-year check up, he registered at exactly the first percentile for height. I worry about him in contact sports with bigger boys.
I’ve always wondered how mothers of football players manage to watch their boys get hit and crushed and tackled to the ground. {Although my parents have told me that watching a beam routine is absolute agony, too. At least the football players have pads.} I love the idea of watching my boy dance.
But I worry. Levey Friedman notes that the socially-acceptable options for competitive activities for boys are narrower than those for girls. She describes the hierarchy of “jocks, nerds, and fags,” and her interviews revealed parental worries about their boys’ masculinity and sexual identity if they participated in a traditionally female activity.
We praise the father who coaches his daughter’s soccer team, but I feel that a mother who brings her preschool-age son to dance class might still be looked at with a Freudian accusation of smothering and producing an effeminate boy.
Ultimately, I want my children to choose the sports that they want to do. I want them to find the activities for which they are passionate and that make them come alive. Sometimes it’s hard to not steer them toward the activities that interest us.
And it’s hard to not worry about the impact of their activities. I worry about the pressure to be thin on girls in dance. I worry about the dance costumes that may be too provocative for young girls. In fact, this costume last spring caused mixed reactions from the Dance Moms at my daughter’s studio – creepy or cute?
And I worry about my son and his athletic abilities and interests. Will being little be problematic for him? Do we “red-shirt” him next year?
It has been interesting to read about these activities from a sociological perspective, seeing the larger cultural context in which my family makes its decisions. It’s made me realize that even my generation of parents, who were raised on Free to Be You and Me, still have a lot of gendered assumptions about our children. We still have a lot of stereotypes, from Soccer Moms and Dance Moms to Pink Girls and Ball Guys.
And it makes me wonder, can’t we all just get along? Can our girls be feminine AND aggressive? Can our boys be masculine AND graceful?
I hope thinking that way doesn’t make me an anomaly.
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Is all this talk about competitive activities and making choices for our children stressing you out? I hope not, but if it is, you will absolutely want to read our next Brilliant Book Club selection. For the month of November, we will be reading:
Maxed Out: American Moms on the Brink by Katrina Alcorn
This book is fantastic. I received my copy last week, and I have already finished reading it. I literally could not put it down. The book reads primarily as a memoir of Alcorn’s journey through early motherhood, while she simultaneously “leaned in” to her high pressure career. And ultimately, she had a breakdown {or what Brene Brown would call a “spiritual awakening”}. Alcorn beautifully weaves her story ~ told with such candor and honesty ~ with statistics and research about the state of American families and American working mothers today.
This is absolutely a book that every working mother needs to read.
We’ll be discussing the book on our blogs on Monday, December 2nd. I hope you’ll read along with us and share your thoughts on our Facebook page, or on twitter using hashtag #BrilliantBookClub.
- 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
