Not surprisingly the quest to be number one and get into the “right” school begins in childhood, and this process of learning about competition is beginning earlier than ever before for American kids. Not only is there Phi Beta Kappa in college and the National Honor Society in high school, but now there is the National Elementary Honor Society (founded in 2008). Not only is there test preparation available, for a price, for graduate admissions tests (LSAT, MCAT, GMAT, and GRE) and college admissions tests (SAT and ACT), but now there is also test prep for kindergarten and preschool admissions. Some parents will pay up to $450 an hour to ensure their kids are prepared for a preschool admissions test.14 In 2009 a company called Bright Kids NYC started a weekend “boot camp” to help children prepare for the gifted exams, and they quickly had a waiting list for their sessions.15
Many kids today who win a competition, do well on an exam, or gain entry into a select group receive a trophy or some other tangible reward.16 Yet research shows that it is best for kids to be intrinsically motivated if they are to stick with an activity over the long haul. Intrinsic motivation happens when you are motivated to compete in order to excel and surpass your own goals and previous performance, and not just beat others.17
In a seminal study by psychologists Mark Lepper and David Greene, preschool children were observed drawing a picture.18 Those who expected a reward based on their per for mance showed less interest in drawing just a few weeks later. The reward created more extrinsic motivation instead of intrinsic motivation.
What happens when we extrinsically reward kids yet demand intrinsic motivation from them just a few years later, when they apply to college? It makes American childhood a confusing and contested time. Tensions about children’s achievement and the “right” way to raise kids were magnified during the furor surrounding the 2011 publication of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, written by Amy Chua, a Yale University law professor. Chua’s daughters were expected to play to win at their music competitions; she wrote, “The only activities your children should be permitted to do are those in which they can eventually win a medal . . . that medal must be gold.”19 Chua claimed her American-born daughters were at a disadvantage relative to their Chinese counterparts because her husband and his family wanted the girls to have fun. She wrote about her mother-in-law, “Florence saw childhood as something fleeting to be enjoyed. I saw childhood as a training period, a time to build character and invest for the future.”20
Later that year Chua’s eldest daughter, Sophia, was admitted to Harvard (the Holy Grail for many competitive parents) during the most competitive admissions cycle to date, when only 6.2 percent of the roughly thirty-five thousand applicants were admitted. Meanwhile thousands of parents whose children would be applying to college sometime in the next decade worried that they should be parenting like Chua.
All of the parents I met while studying competitive after-school activities expressed ambivalence about their elementary school–age children’s participation in these activities. But no one wanted to deny their child the opportunity to succeed. No one was willing to take the chance of not enrolling their kids in competitive activities, especially when all of their classmates appeared to be playing to win all the time.
And yet, some of the two thousand students admitted to Harvard in 2011 were like me: ambitious students who worked hard without a background in organized, elite competition. At the same time some of the lucky admitted students were reared to be Ivy-bound from a young age (like Sophia Chua), fortunate to grow up in affluent families. Many of them worked hard and deserve their slot. But what happens to the equally smart and talented kids who don’t have access to the same resources, who don’t even know to take the chance to try to get past the Ivy gatekeepers?
We tend to hear about the kids who beat the odds, like when the child of the driver for a rich family gets a slot at an Ivy over the boss’ child, because it makes a good story.21 But for every one success story there are thousands who did not make the cut, or who did not even try. In many cases this failure to try goes beyond differential material resources—it is the result of a different way of seeing the world. Sociologist Dalton Conley put it eloquently in a piece on social class: “Just as the social reproduction of the working class involves a constraining of the horizons of the minds of its members, the construction of an upper class involves the expansion of the sense of possibility among its members.”22
Playing to Win tells the story of how parents work to expand the sense of possibility among their children by developing what I call “Competitive Kid Capital™.” This book is not a diatribe against crazy parents. Are some of the parents I met overinvolved? Yes, but instead of simply condemning them I put their choices into perspective by detailing the historical development of competitive after-school activities. I also situate them in the present day, a world filled with businesses advocating for competitive childhoods. I am not uncritical about all the parenting decisions discussed in Playing to Win, but I do place them in context, a process that ultimately reveals middle-class insecurity and concerns about children falling behind.
In the rest of this book you will find the story of what many think you need to do at a young age to successfully get to Dexter Gate, or the gates of other institutions of higher education, and beyond. You will also find a story about the ways in which competition is a central focus of American family life, shaping the lives of young kids who tend to view their competitive activities simply as fun.
Introduction
PLAY TO WIN
It’s just after lunchtime on a Saturday in June. In the basement cafeteria of a public elementary school the smell of Doritos, doughnuts, pizza, and McDonald’s fries hangs in the air. Although there is a chess tournament in progress in the gym, less than fifty feet away, the atmosphere in the cafeteria is boisterous. Some children are entertaining themselves by running between the tables. Others, almost all boys, are engaged in rambunctious games of team chess, known as “bug house.”1 A few kids sit apart, absorbed in playing their Game Boys. The youngest of the children are huddled at the back of the cafeteria, drawn to a table that has been set up near a wall of industrial-size, silver-colored refrigerators. Mesmerized, the kids stare at, and sometimes tentatively touch, the shiny gold trophies that cover the table’s surface. Together they try to count all the trophies—but some are too young to count high enough.
Their parents pass the time in their own ways. Groups of dads sit together, some talking, others gossiping about the event and the other children. Mothers sit by themselves or in pairs. One mom reads The Kite Runner, another labors over the Sunday Times crossword puzzle, and still another keeps an eye on her son while her knitting needles click rhythmically.
Close to half of the parents are not sitting, however. They are jockeying for position in front of two sets of doors that lead from the cafeteria into the gym, where the tournament is taking place. Those closest to the doors strain to see through the single, one-foot-square window in each door to get a glimpse of their child’s game board. Parents are banned from the tournament room because of poor behavior at previous tournaments: helping their children cheat, distracting other children, or even getting into fights with other parents. Some pass messages back to other parents—“He’s down a knight,” for instance—but most fret silently. Every so often a child exits the gym. As the doors swing open, they slam into the faces of parents who had been peering through the windows.
As soon as a child emerges, the interrogation begins. The first question is rarely “Did you win or lose?” A child’s body language usually makes the outcome of the match obvious. Instead parents ask, “What happened?” One girl answers simply, “I blundered my queen.” A boy launches into a blow-by-blow description of the game: “I put my knight on e6 and he put his pawn on f4 and . . .” Some parents, especially moms who generally know less about the fine points of chess, just praise their kids for their success or offer them comfort for their loss.
Within the din of this 140-player tournament, many languages can be heard, including English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic. One tournament participant is deaf. Not everyone in the overcrowded, noisy cafeteria is friendly. When a boy, no older than eight, asks a dad standing next to him if his section has been called to