Just Your Average Family

March 23, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

This sceptred isle . . .this happy breed of men, this little world . . .
Against the envy of less happier lands . . .
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, Manhattan.

Even for those of us in the social science biz, anecdotal evidence is more striking than systematic evidence. As Stalin said, “The death of a million Russian soldiers, that is a statistic. The death of a single Russian soldier, that is a tragedy.” And when it comes to making an impression on someone’s mind, statistics lose out almost every time. Almost. Sometimes you come across one of those numbers that speaks so loudly it stops you in your tracks.

Sure, I know about income inequality and how it’s been increasing, mostly because those at the very, very top of the income ladder are raking in larger and larger amounts. I also know that middle-class and upper-middle-class families are returning to the cities. I know that in my town, New York City, the “good” schools, public and private, are flooded with applications — far more than when we went through this ordeal with my son back in the 90s.

Parents with more kids and more money. There was even a story in the Times a couple of months ago about the Mercedes GLs and other pricey SUVs crowding the streets near expensive preschools at drop-off and pick-up time. It had gotten so bad that the director of one school sent a letter to parents telling them to have the drivers wait somewhere else. (“Drivers” was the word used. The parents themselves were certainly not driving, but they also don’t care for the word “chauffeur.”) The Times story was angled mostly at the foibles and status games of the rich, as in the following: “In the letter, [the director] played perhaps the only bargaining chip she has, stating that failure to observe this rule could hinder their children's chances of getting into the kindergarten of their choice.”

But today, the Times told the story with a single number, and here it is: the median income for white families in Manhattan with children under age 5 was $284,208. The median, not the mean. In other words, the middling Manhattan white family has an income higher than 99% of all US families.

Nevertheless, I’d bet that most of those Manhattan families feel that they don’t have quite enough money. I don’t have data on them, just a strong hunch based on what we know about people and money.

Organizing the Fun out of Play

March 21, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Parents, with the best of intentions, organize sports teams and leagues for kids, and then are dismayed that the kids are stressed by the pressure of winning. “Have fun,” parents tell the kids. “Enjoy playing the game. That’s more important than winning.”

But structures speak more loudly than words, and if you structure kids’ play as a formal competition, with teams and leagues and won-lost records, the message is clear: it’s about winning. It’s as though parents had organized a military marching band for their musically inclined children and then wondered why kids weren’t jamming on the blues.

That was the gist of my previous post. But there’s something else contradictory about organized sports for kids. The whole idea — at least the officially stated idea — is to provide more opportunity for kids to play. But the result can turn out to be less opportunity, less play.

In the suburb where I grew up, there was a nice field where kids often played pick-up baseball. Maybe kids would arrange beforehand to meet there. But often, you’d just go up to the field, and if there was a game, you’d get in. But then the grown-ups who ran Little League, probably in some arrangement with the town government, converted this space into an official Little League field. They sodded the outfield and smoothed down the infield, and when it was done, it was beautiful. A perfectly shaped dirt infield without a pebble, surrounded by neatly trimmed grass, the whole thing surrounded by a chain-link fence.

The only trouble was that the field now became forbidden territory for everything except Little League games. The wise adults who ran the show didn’t want this beautiful field that they had created worn down by kids who just wanted to play there. So now, the field provided less play time than it had before it was taken over by Little League. The goal of having this wonderful official field for the organized games won out over the original goal of providing more opportunity for kids to play.

I saw something similar last September. I happened to be in a park where a girls’ soccer match was just getting started. The girls looked to be about six or seven years old, incredibly cute, one team in shiny pink shirts, the other in blue. It was a scene you could easily imagine parents taking pictures of. But as it turned out, it wasn’t much of a match. The blue team had a couple of really good players, and the game was never close. The pink team would put the ball in play, but after a few seconds the blue team would get it, and one of the good players would take the ball downfield and kick a goal. After a few such scores, the girls in pink were becoming demoralized, and even the girls in blue didn’t seem very excited or happy. The coach of the blue team even benched one of the good players to try to even things up. It didn’t help. Mercifully, six-year-olds don’t play long matches, and the whole dismal thing was over in twenty minutes or so.

What was wrong with this picture? For the purpose of making it easier for girls to play soccer, parents had organized a league with teams and uniforms and scheduled matches. But today, it wasn’t working very well. How might they have had a good match? In other circumstances, the solution would be so obvious that even six-year-olds could think of it: have one or two of the good Blue players switch sides with some of the weaker Pink players. But I doubt that this thought occurred to any of the parents. Even if some of the soccer moms or dads had thought of it, what could they have done? The uniforms, the necessity of keeping won-lost records, and everything else based on the idea of permanent teams in an organized league make that solution all but impossible.

Instead, the coach made her best player stop playing, and for all I know the adults ended the match early rather than let the score get even more lopsided. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but I wonder if anyone thought, “Hey, the whole idea of this league was to get the girls to play soccer? How can our solution be to have one of them, or all of them, play less or not at all?”

The way we organize something carries its own logic, and that logic that often overwhelms our best personal intentions.

Are We Having Fun Yet?

March 19, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

John Tesh was on the Fox news show this morning talking about kids’ sports and the emphasis on winning. Kids themselves, in surveys about why they play sports, put winning far down the list, and the main reason kids drop out of sports is that they weren’t having fun. (I cannot find the original study by the Institute for the Study of Youth Sports at Michigan State University, only references to it online.) Tesh blamed the winning-is-everything approach on parents.

Sure, it’s easy to find anecdotal evidence of overly competitive parents overly involved in their kids’ sports. But the pressure on winning comes as much from the organization of the game as from the people involved. As soon as you set up a formal structure — leagues with teams, uniforms, schedules, rules, won-lost records and other statistics — your focus is no longer on the fun of playing. Instead, the point of the game is to work towards some future measurable goal, a championship. And there lies the contradiction: fun isn’t in the future, it’s in the present. And it can’t be easily measured. Championships are about winning, not about fun.

Pick-up games are much less organized, and they are much more fun. They have no prizes, no championships. They have no permanent teams, no uniforms, no scheduling, no record keeping. The kid’s first objective is to play; winning is secondary. For example, in baseball, what do you do if you have only 13 players instead of the officially requisite eighteen (nine to a side)? In pick-up games, kids think up all kinds of solutions; they think outside the box of official baseball rules. You improvise positions and rules (no right field hitting, batting team supplies the catcher, etc.). As kids leave or arrive, teams change, so it’s not clear which team is winning. Often the game doesn’t really end, it fades out, so you can’t really say what the final score was or who won. And yet, despite the fuzziness over the winner or the score, you’ve managed to play baseball for hours.

What about a league game? If fewer than nine kids from one team show up, it’s a forfeit, and nobody plays. The message here is clear: determining the winner is more important than having a good game. Or any game at all. But that’s because of the organized structure, not the people involved. Put these same people in a pick-up game, and they’d have no such problem.

Yet grown-ups continue to organize kids’ games and to force children’s play within the rigid structures of teams and leagues, coaches and practices, record-keeping and trophies. Of course, the parents (most of them) tell the kids that the important thing is to have fun. But despite what the parents say, everything they do points in the other direction, towards winning.

I’m reminded of a line from the British movie “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.” The protagonist, a young schoolgirl, has just done badly in some school competition (not sports), and a grown-up tries to console her: “Winning isn’t the important thing.”

“Then why is that what they give the prizes for?” asks the girl.

Why indeed? It’s not hypocrisy—I’m sure most grown-ups mean what they say about fun and winning —it’s just ignorance about social structures and how they shape our ideas about what’s important.

“300” and Counting

March 18, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

I sometimes ask students if Violence is an American value. Their first thought is usually: No, of course not; violence is bad. But then I point out the amount of violence in our popular culture (TV, music, movies) and in our real lives (US rates of violent crime, even after the extraordinary decline in the last 15 years, are still much higher than those of other industrialized nations).

My point in all this is to question the idea — often found in sociology textbooks — that values are primarily guides to action. That definition implies that we can discover a culture’s values by looking at what people do. Looking at Americans do, we see that they produce and consume a lot of violence. So either Americans value violence, or there’s something wrong with this sociological idea about values.

The answer I usually give is that the guides-to-action definition is at best incomplete. Despite our actions, Americans and American culture do not value violence itself. Violence is not an ultimate good —like success or freedom —that we use to justify some action. It’s just that we don’t mind using violence to get some of the results that we do value. We don’t think violence is inherently good. We just don’t think it’s all that bad.

Brian Gellman, who blogs at Intel Dump, may get me to change my thinking. Intel Dump is a blog run by former military officers, and it has provided excellent military analysis of the current war. But this post, inspired by the recent hit movie “300,” shaded over from purely military matters into the cultural arena.

Critics of 300 fail to understand what many critics of the current administration’s handling of the “Global War on Terror” fail to understand. American culture. . . .Americans today overwhelming see military power as a solution to any number of problems.

Critics of current US policies in the world who believe things will change when the current administration leaves office are fooling themselves . . . The reality is that until American culture changes, US policies will not change significantly.

So maybe we don’t mind violence as a means to an end; maybe it's the means we most prefer, at least in international matters. This preference goes along with another idea that forms the basis for at least three hundred American movies from “HighNoon” to “Top Gun” and “300,” an idea I’ve mentioned before — that all problems (moral, psychological, personal) will be resolved through a final, decisive contest between two adversaries. It works in the movies.

Unfortunately, in real life, where we cannot fade to black and roll the credits, the results are rarely so simple.