I once watched my seven- and nine-year-old sons challenge each other to a head-banging contest. They wanted to see who could stand hitting his own head with a series of harder and harder objects: a whiffle bat, a clipboard, a two-by-four. When they'd ramped up to running headfirst into the garage door, I stepped in. They ran off happily, no doubt to see who could drop the biggest spitball off the top of the monkey bars.
Most of the time, I laugh at my kids' competitiveness. But the day my eldest came home from school in tears because he'd gotten razzed for coming in last in a race to compute fractions, I stopped laughing. He was devastated. It seemed so pointless.
Was that the event that opened my eyes to the damage competition is doing to our kids? Or was it watching my niece break down during her grade-school spelling bee? Maybe it was reading about the mother who was arrested for beating her child when he didn't place in the top fifteen in a statewide math competition. Or hearing about parents hosting Iron Chef contests with twelve-year-olds.
Of course, some things in life are meant to be competitive. Organized sports, for instance: Winning, losing--that's part of the deal, that's why we have teams, playoffs, championships.
But most things in our kids' lives are not meant to be competitive. When my younger son was in kindergarten, his teacher pasted a paper racetrack on one wall. Each child's name was printed on a cardboard car. When a child misbehaved, his racecar stalled while the others surged ahead. Those kids at the back of the pack were urged to shape up so they could catch and pass the ones at the front.
I feel for anybody in charge of fifteen five-year-olds. But I'm not sure it makes sense to use competitiveness to socialize kids or encourage proper classroom behavior. Should Peter learn to stop grabbing the paste from Kylie because he really wants to move his car ahead of Jacob's (HA ha!)--or because grabbing paste isn't the right way to get along with a classmate?
Somehow--and I'm not exactly sure who or what is to blame--the competitiveness that governs kids' sports has leached into nearly every aspect of their lives. Librarians set up book-reading competitions. Music teachers challenge children to race through lesson books. PTAs encourage kids to try to sell more wrapping paper than their friends do.
Some contests are as old as the hills. Spelling bees, science fairs, and piano recitals have been around since my grandmother was a girl. But so have a host of social ills that we try to fix. These days, we should be thinking carefully about what happens when we inject competition where it doesn't belong. How many kids get turned off of reading for pleasure for the rest of their lives because they used to have to race-read books in fifth grade? How many great works of art never get made because a messy tempura-painting free-for-all turned into a blue-ribbon juried art event? With sports, at least, kids can usually opt in or out (so long as parents let them). But when regular school subjects and extracurricular arts events get competitive, it's not that simple.
I say I'm unsure how we got to this point in society, but I'm willing to bet that reality TV has played a big part. Survivor and Fear Factor may not mark the end of civilization, but they sure have coarsened the culture. There isn't a single channel, it seems, that hasn't found a way to turn another aspect of life into a contest: singing, dancing, cooking, decorating (decorating?)--even living together in the same house. It's so all-pervasive I wasn't surprised to turn on a Discovery Kids' show recently to see a young teen girl scowling into the camera and saying, "I'm gonna kick some Yellow Team butt. Those guys are going down!"
Which brings me to my last question: When everything becomes a competition, isn't everybody a rival? And if we teach kids to try to win at any endeavor, what are we teaching them about those who lose?
Our society already treats the disadvantaged badly enough; I'm afraid that we're also teaching our kids that those who don't win are detestable, even expendable.
Last Halloween, my sons got into a contest over their candy. Not who had most, nor who had the best--but who could make their haul last the longest. It was a war of attrition, and it was long. At the end they were left with nothing but a lot of stale Butterfingers.
My point is not that competition is bad--hey, I was happy to tip their plastic pumpkins into the trash--only that some kids will compete over
anything. Some kids are just built that way. And there's no denying that many parts of our society reward competition. But plenty of things in life should not be built along those lines--love, caregiving, the arts. As parents, I don't think we need to encourage more competition. I think we ought to be cultivating those less-natural impulses: sharing, cooperating, and looking at the task at hand for the pleasure or benefit it can bring, not for who can be beaten or what prize can be won for doing it.
