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 half of all memberships, or about forty thousand kids.14
Each case study activity varies in the extent to which it emphasizes individual versus team competition. Soccer relies on a strong team structure, while dance develops a slightly weaker but identifiable team element, and chess involves the least amount of team competition. Chess and soccer are inherently competitive, meaning there is almost always a “winner” and a “loser” when a game is played, while dance is inherently expressive, so a competitive structure is imposed on the activity. Finally, the gender makeup of the cases varies. Soccer tends to have the same number of teams for both sexes by age group. Dance is dominated by girls, but there are some boys who participate. Chess, on the other hand, is dominated by boys, though there is a minority of girls as well.
For each activity I had two field sites: one urban, in and around Metro, and one suburban, in West County. Both chess sites—Metro Chess and West County Chess—have organizations that offer group classes, private lessons, chess camps, and regular chess tournaments; but Metro Chess is far more competitive, serious, and developed than West County Chess. The dance field sites, Metroville Elite Dance Academy and Westbrook Let’s Dance Studio, follow a similar pattern, as the Elite Dance Academy is in an urban setting and is much more competitive than the Let’s Dance Studio in the suburbs. Both offer classes, competition rehearsals, and group competition. Finally, the soccer field sites of Westfield Soccer Club and Metro Soccer Co-op offer a different picture, with the former being in a suburban location and highly competitive and the latter being in an urban setting with a greater emphasis on cooperation than competition. Both have nonprofit status and organize travel soccer teams that play in various regional soccer leagues and travel to regional and national tournaments.15
I engaged in six to nine months of intensive observation with each activity, talking informally with those involved, attending tournaments, and taking extensive field notes. During that time I conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with some of the parents, coaches, and children I met. I completed 172 interviews—ninety-five with parents, thirty-seven with children, and the rest with teachers, coaches, and administrators—to explore how competition shapes the lives of these contemporary American families.
As will be discussed, the group of families I met is diverse, though almost all belong to the broadly defined middle class. But variations exist within the middle class, particularly when it comes to education and income, as reflected in the Playing to Win families. On these measures the soccer parents are the most affluent, and the chess and soccer parents