Competition in kids’ sports is unhinged. Why do we keep doing this?

Humans want to cooperate. Stop training kids to compete in the “real world,” and start changing the world they’ll inherit.

My nieces and nephews are extremely active kids, and they have the privilege of being involved in everything, all of the time. There’s constantly an extracurricular activity to observe or support.

My sister’s oldest, in sixth grade this year, has been joining competitive sports since she was a toddler. This school year, it was cheer, basketball and track. Each of those sports is varying levels of interesting as a spectator, but the part that’s hardest for me to stomach at these events is the competition — which has really ratcheted up since she got to middle school.

Competition among children is bananas

Am I alone here??

Why does a cheer performance have to be scored and ranked? Why are parents arguing with refs on the sidelines over the clumsy penalties of an 11-year-old basketball player? Why did I hear a dad from the bleachers yell for his middle-schooler to “PUSH!!” as she ran the last leg of the mile last weekend?

Why am I only allowed to cheer for the kids wearing the same colors as my niece?

And why are we celebrating her team’s crushing wins when it means another group of children is suffering the sadness of a devastating loss?

Extracurriculars like sports aren’t inherently bad for children, as

Melinda Wenner Moyer

explored in a three-part deep dive last year. But they’re not inherently good, either. Kids — even those who excel at sports — are harmed more by the competitive expectations of adults than by any of the work or time extracurriculars require of recent generations of children.

Moyer cited an informal survey that asked college athletes, "What is your worst memory from playing youth and high school sports?”

The overwhelming response was, "The ride home from games with my parents,” when the kids wanted to go back to being kids, but the parents were still analyzing their performance and providing armchair coaching for the next game.

Those same college athletes were asked what their parents did that made them feel joy playing in sports, and the overwhelming response was when their parents told them, "I love to watch you play.”

No matter how much they love the game or how well they play it, children just want to be children. It is completely unhinged that adults turn kids’ healthy need for play and team cooperation into a drive toward made-up success and manufactured victory.

‘But don’t we need to prepare them for the real world?’

Adults seem to believe that kids need to learn how to compete as children because life will be full of competition when they grow up.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

There are limits to this competitive drive that make adults feel like they’re being reasonable. In my town, they don’t keep score when the four-year-olds play soccer, and that’s a delightful game to watch. But they’re keeping score by age 6 or 7. By age 11, the kids are playing sports whose stats are tracked online. Have we all agreed that’s when it’s healthy to start judging yourself based on your position relative to those around you?

And if 11 is too young or 7 is too young, when is the appropriate age?

When is the appropriate age to begin training people to shed their natural tendencies toward cooperation and generosity and give way to a worldview that believes another person’s gain is necessarily their loss?

Training kids to compete fairly, accept defeat graciously and win with humility prepares them with the strengths and tools they’ll need to face competition as adults — competition that happens mostly around money. Applying for jobs, negotiating pay, vying for promotions, making sales calls, attracting customers.

It feels reasonable to say this is a safe way to prepare kids for the “real world.”

But why are we changing the kids instead of changing the world they’ll inherit?

Humans want to cooperate

Evolutionarily, humans have tended toward cooperation, because survival of the group has generally meant survival of the individual. Early humans only strayed into competition in the face of resource scarcity. Later, cultural influences have driven competitive tendencies. Cultures centered on individual success and manufactured scarcity — like the U.S. — train humans to compete with one another.

But even in our competition-obsessed culture, our tendency toward cooperation is repeatedly observed — such as in a popular experiment known as the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

In the experiment two participants each role play that they’re arrested for a crime committed together and have to choose whether to testify against the other or stay silent. They know their odds: If both stay silent, they’ll each be incarcerated for one year. If both testify, they’ll each get two years. But if one testifies while the other stays silent, the silent partner gets three years while the testifier gets zero. Participants can’t talk to each other and have no way of knowing what the other will do.

The most mutually beneficial option is for both participants to stay silent, but that comes with the risk of the worst outcome — getting all the jail time while the other participant testifies and goes free.

“Since cooperation is individually costly, standard economic models predict that people should not cooperate,” says one analysis of the experiment. “Yet cooperation in one-time encounters with strangers is common outside the laboratory and a substantial amount of cooperative behavior is observed in one-shot [Prisoner’s Dilemma] experiments in the lab with anonymous players.”

Knowing the risks, humans still choose to cooperate.

Yet we continue to manufacture situations that force us to compete for survival. Namely, our culture allows resources to become concentrated among a tiny portion of the population, then expects the rest of us to work in service of them in order to access the resources we need.

Capitalism is a system that intentionally requires people to work for a living and ensures most people are only barely able to achieve that.

This is the so-called real world competitive sports prime children to thrive in.

Stay soft around the edges

I remember one all-hands meeting when I worked at a digital media startup. The company was just beginning to flail, and leadership was trying to shift the culture from one of creativity and cooperation to one of “high performance” and competition.

We were discussing some kind of incentive plan that was meant to motivate us to work harder and produce more. It was clearly designed for the type of person who might run marathons on the weekend — all about pushing to be a little better, beat our personal records.

I raised my hand and asked, “Do you have anything in mind to motivate those of us who aren’t inherently competitive?”

The CEO met my eye from across a few rows of my coworkers and replied jovially, “I think you’re more competitive than you believe.”

I’d worked closely with him and had a lot of respect for the wisdom I imagined he brought to his role as the founder of this company he’d bootstrapped from the ground up — in that way our culture tends to believe white men with money must be very wise. When he looked me in the eye and spoke with certainty, I trusted him.

I thought there must be a competitiveness in me I wasn’t accessing. If I could just unlock it, I could be the high performer this person saw in me.

Instead, I quit within six months.

“High performance” metrics have never worked for me. I used to think that was a shortcoming, but I realize now it’s a strength (and thank you,

❤️ Jenny Blake

, for sharing the sentiment so I don’t feel alone!). Training workers to compete seems like a good way to get people to be the best they can be, but this always serves capitalists more than it serves workers. Pushing us to compete with each other or even ourselves is a way to wring as much out of us as possible.

Forcing competition on children doesn’t push them to be better people. It trains them to believe all that matters is being better than other people.

I am not more competitive than I believe. I’m inherently cooperative, and by some dumb luck that hasn’t been trained out of me. That boss may or may not have believed he saw a fierce competitor in me; he might have just needed to motivate me to work harder. Either way, it wasn’t true. There’s no vicious fighter in here. I’m forever a big ol’ softie, and our world could be a better place if everyone believed that was OK.

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