Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture by Levey Friedman Hilary (review)

Many studies bring to light the importance of enjoying competition and the hierarchical relations associated with it in definitions of masculinity. The “spirit of competition” is used to interpret gender differences in such varied areas as academic study orientations, professional careers, and leisure activities. This agonistic penchant has been shown to be a central feature of “hegemonic masculinity” (Connell, 2015)⁽¹⁾ as well as a source of masculine domination (Bourdieu, 1998)⁽²⁾ and its associated costs (Dulong et al., 2012)⁽³⁾. It is from this perspective that we can best apprehend Hilary Levey Friedman’s study as it relates to gender studies. By focusing on children’s involvement in competitive after-school activities (defined as “organized activities run by adults where records are kept and prizes given out”, p. 8), she shows us how young girls can be initiated early into various forms of competition. More specifically, while the central research concern in this book is the reproduction of academic inequalities, it offers precious insight into the conditions under which girls engage in these activities and how they appropriate the spirit of competition they are led to develop there.

The book is based on a study of children aged six to twelve and their parents living in a major conurbation in the northeast United States. Through interviews and observation of an almost exclusively middle-class population, the author studies the wellsprings of involvement in three competitive activities: chess, soccer and dance. For each of her case study activities she observed ordinary practitioners in one urban and one suburban field site. The study is based on 16 months of observation and 172 interviews with families, including children themselves and activity instructors. The cross-tabulated data are quite dense, though it is regrettable that so little from the interviews with children was cited in the analysis (especially in the last chapter, concentrated on their perspective). Most of the book is about what motivates parents to enrol their children in these activities, rather than on their socializing effects. The three activities attract quite different practitioners: most chess-club participants are boys; dance studios attract almost exclusively girls, most from lower middle-class families, while soccer clubs are more mixed and attract the highest proportion of children from highly educated, high-income middle-class backgrounds.

The first chapter, “Outside class: a history of American children’s competitive activities”, recounts a socio-historical process that affected all three activities: the intensification and generalization of competitions and contests. According to the author, this historical movement led to an “explosion of hypercompetitiveness” starting in the 1980s; she cites a series of indicators of the process: a remarkable increase in participant numbers (to 3 million children in soccer, 400,000 in chess); the development of new types of competitions due to the multiplication of youth leagues and age categories; ever-earlier rankings; and coach or instructor professionalization. With these points in mind we can understand how it is that greater numbers of girls have come to participate in competitive activities: a wider offer of strongly competitive practices, including in activities like dance that did not use to fall into that category.

But the inflation of competition should be related to the social groups that appropriate it. Drawing directly on a study by Annette Lareau (2011)⁽⁴⁾, Friedman explains that the rise in children’s involvement in competitive activities reflects their middle-class parents’ understanding of childhood, wherein considerable emphasis is placed on supervised activities designed to develop their skills.⁽⁵⁾ Friedman shows that parents who support their children’s investment in competitive activities expect this to help them develop skills that will facilitate academic and professional success, regardless of sex. She identifies five types of skills in these parents’ accounts: “internalizing the importance of winning”, “bouncing back from a loss to win in the future”, “learning how to work well under time pressure”, “learning how to perform in stressful situations”, and “being able to perform under the...