I haven't read Hanna Rosin's book yet, The End of Men: And the Rise of Women
Brooks praises Rosin's book. He says that she correctly shows that women are managing to keep their heads above this new economy, while men are struggling to find work and a purpose. Women are more flexible about what kinds of jobs they will take. They work harder in school and get better grades. Men, on the other hand, are clinging to old norms and failing to make some necessary changes. Thus, their salaries are dropping and their role as "breadwinner" has eroded.
I would like to see this data fully broken down by income and by career. Men, who have traditionally worked in manufacturing and construction, have taken a huge hit in this economy. Many of those jobs are never coming back. Much blame can be laid at the demise of the unions. But upper income men in medicine, law, and business are doing just fine. Some men are in trouble, but it's not clear that all men are in trouble.
Part of me questions whether this is really a crisis or evidence that men are failing. If men take up the slack in the homefront, while women bring home the paycheck, this is not a bad thing. Nobody is failing. There's just a switch in gender determinism about divisions of labor. Who cares, right? If my son becomes the full time parent and his partner earns a big salary as a NYC lawyer, why would I care?
On the other hand, I want my sons, as much as my nieces, to work towards a goal and then later on negotiate with their partners about divisions of labor. We need to be preparing the boys for the new economy, so they have new skills to make a full range of decisions about their future. Sadly, there isn't much that we can do for older men who refuse to take the few jobs that are available, because they are traditional chick jobs. But, perhaps, we are making bad parenting decisions that end up hurting boys down the line.
I do think that boys, more than girls, are pushed to excel at sports at the expense of their education. Many parents think that sports are the key to getting into college and so don't get mad at them about C's in English class. Sports eat up time that could be spent reading. Now, you know that I love sports and support Jonah's soccer habit, but if he has a test, I don't send him to practice. Grades matter more than goals. So, even in upper income towns like ours, I see potential problems.
There will have to be other adjustments. Men will have to learn to consider new kinds of employment. There are more options than stock trader or auto-mechanic.
I do think that there's something else going on in these numbers. Something beyond a boy/girl thing. (It's not a competition, btw, and nobody should be celebrating these changes.) It's a decline of the one income family. Unions protected jobs and kept salaries high enough to allow for one person to support the family. Unions are gone, living wages are gone, whole professions are gone. Working class men do have to adjust, but let's give them a break. They haven't failed. Their entire way of life shifted in ten years. In time, new norms and, hopefully, new opportunities will arise. The former automotive worker might not be able to take the secretarial job, but his son will.
Apt. 11d 
My chair, dean, provost and president are all women (VP of academic affairs is a man). My dean’s secretary is a white-haired grandfather who is superb and overworked.
You can’t stop today as it comes speeding down the track….
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You’re right; the so-called “end of men” is a class issue. Employment is a game of musical chairs in the postindustrial economy; each year there are fewer seats at the table. Upper-middle-class men aren’t experiencing this, just working-class and lower-middle-class (“Limbo”) men. The skillsets required for the jobs these men held don’t translate well into service economy jobs. The jobs they held required “command-decisions” and lots of latitude on problem-solving. Service-oriented jobs have a very rigid chain of authority and harsh discipline for those who make decisions on their own. Service-oriented jobs structure the workforce with the assumptions that are radically different from that of the shop floor or construction site. Service-oriented jobs assume that no craftsmanship is necessary or even necessarily possible on the part of the employees.
So let’s be frank—women have survived in those environments and used them as stepping-stones to something better because we’ve had a great deal more practice at dealing with dismissiveness and disrespect than men have. We’re already developed an extensive range of coping mechanisms to deal with the incessant stream of bullshit we’ve had to engage with even as children—working class women moreso. Working class men are used to relatively isolated environments where they have a certain amount of earned respect. It’s hard to give that up not just because of pride, but because the coping mechanisms necessary are in conflict with societal constructs of masculinity.
(Someone smarter than me needs to write the book on how USian concepts of masculinity are very similar across race and class, while concepts of femininity are strikingly different.)
I wouldn’t be so sure about the total outsourcing of manufacturing. Cheap oil made that possible, and cheap oil is disappearing faster than manufacturing jobs. If a cheaper replacement for the fuel necessary for transnational shipping isn’t created, you’ll see a return to local sourcing. Our infrastructure in the US has not been maintained, so construction jobs won’t disappear either (let’s hear it for a new WPA!). But even so, the numbers for those jobs are not going to require the tired poor hungry masses. Unionization of service jobs is another thing we’re likely to see in the future.
What I haven’t seen so far: un- or underemployed men as the new housewives. In the Rust Belt, most working- and lower-middle class women aren’t paid enough to be a “breadwinner” (meaning enough to support children and a nonworking spouse), so the lack of a second income is just experienced as the financial rug being pulled out from under, and not as gender role reversal (there is plenty of evidence of self-medication w/drugs and alcohol amongst depressed, unemployed men). Also, “women’s” jobs aren’t necessarily any more financially stable than the men’s. Like real estate, it’s “location, location, location”…..and few locations are offering anything like economic stability.
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and cheap oil is disappearing faster than manufacturing jobs.
The shale gas extraction companies are buying ads in which they explicitly argue that cheap natural gas will result in the return of manufacturing to the area. The implicit argument is that they shouldn’t be regulated/taxed because of this.
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The environmental impact of shale gas extraction makes it anything but cheap; these companies just want to cost-shift down the line to the populace (including who bears the burden of all the cancer treatment that’ll be needed) and have the right to create national sacrifice zones that they’ll have no responsibility to clean up or maintain.
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But do you honestly think that men will just slink off and take the secretary jobs without putting up a fight first? I foresee gender relations being really ugly for a while with some type of backlash against women. There’s a profile in Slate magazine of a woman filmmaker this week and the comments below are all these horrible sexist comments about her body and that old standby “Make me a sandwich.” I wonder if domestic abuse will go up in the process of this change in gender roles. It’s also possible that the men will just up and leave altogether as they have in the African-American community. We could also get one o those Russian matriarchies where all the guys are alcoholics. I’m not optimistic . . .
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where all the guys are alcoholics
I’d prefer the term “Going Malt.”
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La Lubu, you’re dead on about women being used to disrespect. My ability to swallow my pride and take crap from clients is key to my success as a consultant.
Do I remember you are a tradeswoman from the South side of Chicago? What’s your take on the teacher’s strike?
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Men, who have traditionally worked in manufacturing and construction, have taken a huge hit in this economy. Many of those jobs are never coming back. Much blame can be laid at the demise of the unions.
Call me a bad liberal, but much blame can also be laid at the rise of the unions.
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Unions are responsible for the rise of the middle class. Without us, the US economy (and with it, infrastructure) will resemble third world conditions. We’re moving in that direction right now. Like what you see? Keep blaming unions and not the oligarchy.
Jen, I’m much further south of I-80 than Chicago! I support the Chicago teachers. Their president, Karen Lewis, was the speaker for last year’s Mother Jones Dinner downstate (as in the labor activist, not the magazine)—she was great. If I wasn’t on my phone, I could give you a link to an interview from 2010 in Rethinking Schools on how teachers organized both within the union and out in the neighborhoods to address issues. They aren’t striking over money; the financial issues are pretty much settled (I think they might still be haggling a little over pension, but not paychecks). Working conditions, and to put it bluntly, issues of craftsmanship are at stake. The teaching profession is going through the type of Tayloristic deskilling that factory workers over a hundred years ago experienced. The type of education deform that is going on nationwide, not just Chicago, is a national disgrace. I sincerely hope they succeed. If they don’t, it’ll just be open season on teachers and on public schools–and we don’t need anything else driving away talented people from that profession.
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I think the conditions which enabled private sector unions to thrive are damaged or destroyed: the USA was at one time an isolated market, and industrial production required many many workers. Now there are lots of robots, and the competition is in Ulsan and Shenzhen. AND you can ship things across the ocean in a container for 14 cents a pound. So a company which pays $30 an hour will make a product which is considerably more expensive than its Korea/Vietnam/Mexico competition. You shut down Ford for six months and you drive up the sales of Kias, and then Ford is out of money and can’t pay a high wage anyway.
Once industrial wages have sunk a lot, then industrial workers will resent and oppose public sector workers, unionized or not (as happened in Wisconsin, where private sector union workers voted for Walker in large numbers).
There’s a long and bitter struggle ahead, and some battles the unions will win, but I can’t imagine that wages will stay much higher than the Shenzhen level plus 14 cents a pound shipping over the long haul.
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I teach at a non-elite rural private college and most of my students are the children of farmers, workers, or former factory works. The performance gap between their male and female children is growing significantly. The female students come to college with more focus, and the expectation that they need to get the degree so they can get a job with benefits, to support their future farmer husbands or underemployed laborer husbands. Frankly, I don’t think factory worker dads really know how to raise their sons to take higher education more seriously. Most of our male students come to college to extend their high school athletic careers. They feel at home on the gridiron or the baseball diamond, but not in the classroom. I think the denial runs very deep, and they believe that after spending a few years playing Division 3 sports, they can drop out and find some kind of good paying physical work. The impending “fracking” boom is perpetuating this dream.
Curiously, recruitment to our female sports teams took a serious dip this year. The speculation is that working class families are more willing to take on debt to allow their sons to keep playing football than they are to allow thier daughers to play softball.
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I blame it on the “Synthetic Success of Video Games.”
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Don’t overlook the education problem David Brooks mentions. It is real. Even at the technical university where I am the director of institutional research, a markedly lower percentage of boys graduate. Their GPAs are significantly lower as are their retention rates, even after correcting for lower GPAs.
This constitutes a dramatic reversal of gender comparisons 30 years ago when success rates for women at technical universities were lower.
Given the abrupt shift, I see no biological basis for the reversal. Our society has changed as have educational practices. Now boys/men are a risk group for educational failure.
Do not dismiss the difference so easily. The causes are complex and deep rooted–or my merry band of data miners would have uncovered them already.
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Perry, you bring up a good point about younger men, and it brought to mind something my father said during one of our conversations on the topic (colloquially known between the two of us as the “why are my cousins/your nephews such lost souls/drifters/makers of poor choices (and less charitable descriptions depending on latest antics)?” conversation). Anyway, he claims the lack of male mentors outside of fathers. Because sure, there’s more official absentee fatherhood these days, but back in his (socioeconomic/geographical/cultural) place and time, there was a great deal of uninvolved fathers. Still, those kids had access to male mentors outside the family. My dad credits a great deal of his development as a person and interest in/curiosity about aspects of the world he wouldn’t otherwise have had much access to (his dad was an involved father, especially about boxing and weightlifting, but grandpa was a high school dropout whose parents died by the time he was 15) to male mentors…..teachers, coaches, other neighborhood fathers/guys, the guys busting one another’s balls at the barbershop or other hangouts, uncles and more distant male relatives and their friends, friends of his father, that sort of thing.
And I think he’s on to something, because that’s something that has dramatically changed from my generation (older X) to the millenials. Pedagogy hasn’t changed in that time frame; both X and the millenials grew up with Title IX. But….girls still have role models and access to women outside of their mothers; boys, for the most part, don’t. Sports seem more restrictive for boys now than they did back when I was growing up; girls’ teams seem more willing to build players, teach skills to novice players willing to work hard and show up for practice, while the boys’ teams even at the early grade levels expect them to already have experience. Shop classes have disappeared in many school districts. A lot of learning takes place in environments where kids have contact with adults that don’t have to be the parent, and not just learning about the subject matter at hand—they learn how to be adults. And they learn how to earn the respect of adults. How to follow codes, and when to switch codes.
These are still things girls are learning. Boys aren’t. They don’t know how to get from step A to step D. It’s like the internet joke where “something magic happens in between”. I have a cousin who developed some serious health issues as a result of his employment (he’s a high school dropout who hasn’t gone back for his GED yet…..to be charitable, he doesn’t have access to a car, and he would have to travel to another city to do his GED prep, and there’s absolutely no public transportation between these places, and frankly….no one would pick him up hitchhiking ‘cuz he’s a sweet kid, but looks like a thug). He’s getting a settlement on this. I spoke to his younger brother (another dropout), who told me that his plans for the settlement money was to open a restaurant. Both the younger brother and me think this is insane. Where did he get this idea? Well, he’s a good cook (it’s a Sicilian thing!) And he watches all these shows on TV about start-up restaurants being run by guys who he can relate to (i.e.: look, speak and act like him).
And the thing is, maybe he good run a successful restaurant someday. He has the raw talent, and he has the passion for it. He just has no experience and no idea about how to go from point A on. Point A is the dream. Then “magic shit happens” on the force of that dream, and then voila! Success! Constrast that with the niece of a friend of mine, whose dream is to be a nurse practioner. She was taking college-level credit courses while still in high school, and figured she’d get her LPN and earn her RN while working as an LPN (higher pay/better benefits than retail). Then she’d complete further coursework while working as an RN. She’s well on her way. Why? Because she had role models and a path.
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Gahh. Hate typing on a phone. Plz ignore typos.
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You typed something that long on a phone? Women really do work harder.
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Or maybe women just have giant phones because of purses.
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You win the internetz today, MH.
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I blame organized sports, and video games.
Laura, you wrote,
I do think that boys, more than girls, are pushed to excel at sports at the expense of their education. Many parents think that sports are the key to getting into college and so don’t get mad at them about C’s in English class. Sports eat up time that could be spent reading. Now, you know that I love sports and support Jonah’s soccer habit, but if he has a test, I don’t send him to practice. Grades matter more than goals. So, even in upper income towns like ours, I see potential problems.
I see this. I think the parents who choose the Athletic Recruit route to college believe academic work can be made up with the help of tutors. I hear the refrain, “It’s only 6th grade” (insert appropriate grade) frequently. Athletic boys can form their own clique, and that clique can actively discourage members from academic pursuits, such as reading.
Are sports healthy? Yes, in moderation. When children devote most of their free time to athletic pursuits (games, practices, television, sports video games) to the exclusion of academic pursuits, it becomes a problem. I also think the problem builds over time. Much of the work in the early grades seems easy to adults or teens, but it’s not easy for children. Spelling, arithmetic, reading, etc. are essential for later success.
I also notice a cultural difference. As we have kids in private schools, we spend time volunteering for those schools. Part of the volunteering includes attending admissions events to talk to applicants and their families. In general, American parents ask about sports and dorm life. European, Asian, Indian, and professors and teachers ask about academics. A huge percentage of the children in our kids’ schools have at least one immigrant parent, or a parent who works in education (K-12 or university).
It hurts to admit that the ability to play sports at a high level can make an enormous difference in college admissions. My kids aren’t athletic recruits (bwahaha!) but they have friends and relatives who are. It’s an entirely different system. My daughter had friends who were committed to Ivy League level schools as sophomores in high school. Kids who want to be recruited apparently start attending scouting camps in the summer after freshman year–and they apply for those camps the previous year!
As the athletic recruitment system is brutal in taking only a few recruits, compared to those who want to be recruited, that’s an enormous amount of time and money lost for the families whose children aren’t recruited. And then I know of kids who choose to attend less academic colleges, solely due to the athletic opportunities available. It’s just a different culture.
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Our town is very egalitarian, athletically, and lots of weight is put on girls athletics. (We even have our own girls-only sports shop! http://www.hersport.com/ )
And do you know what comes with sports equality by the time you get to middle school? Girls sports cliques. The cool mean girls who made travel soccer or basketball, and excluding the girls who only made the “B Team.”
Eldest Raggirl made the science team last spring. Other girls? There were a few. But what about girls A, B, and C? “Oh, the competition conflicted with the 5K, so they didn’t try out.” When you give sports equality, you end up with girls acting a lot like boys.
Youngest Raggirl wants to play soccer, because some of her friends are. I am resisting, because I don’t want to become part of that culture. (Softball is for the girls who want to play, but don’t want to draw blood.) Don’t know how to walk the line between supporting athletics, but not to the point where it interferes with academics — especially when so many sports are practices most days, and then games on the weekend.
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It’s possible to walk that line, Ragtime. Jonah has to do homework before practice. If homework isn’t finished, then he doesn’t go to practice. He has to be very organized; not a bad thing. It’s not hard to combine one sport plus school. The kids who fuck up are those who do multiple sports and who have parents who give more praise for goals than A’s.
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Is Jonah in high school? Because friends who have kids at the local public high school have stories. One friend’s daughter was not allowed to play on a varsity team, because she knew she would miss every other Friday practice for a high-level arts commitment.
Our local high school also has a perennial conflict between coaches’ power and academics. More than a decade ago, a new administration insisted the coaches allow Juniors to visit colleges during spring vacation, rather than require them to attend practice that week. Many coaches resigned over the issue.
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It’s possible to walk that line, Ragtime. Jonah has to do homework before practice. If homework isn’t finished, then he doesn’t go to practice.
I guess it depends on where you draw the “line.” Is it just “get good grades,” in which case we could probably swing it, but I think it would require dropping everything else.
What are Jonah’s other after-school activities? (3-5 pm) Is he a girl scout? (I’m sure he’d look cute in the sash.) Does he attend religious school? Is he in the school play? Piano lessons? Odyssey of the Mind? Each of the Raggirls does one or two (or three or four. . .) of these things, depending on the week and the season, and all of which are valued equally with spring softball, and already sometimes conflict with each other. (“What do you mean, there’s a mandatory Science Olympiad practice on Wednesday! That’s Hebrew School! Am I going to have to pick between science and religion right now?!”)
Now add in a sports practice at 5:30 or 6:00 for two hours, at different days on different weeks, and definitely not the same days for the fall sport and the spring sport, and it is already understood that there’s no way a kid can do homework “before” practice most days. Most days, there’s no time!
It is already understood that on softball days, bedtimes are pushed back an hour, and homework gets pushed past dinner.
The Raggirls are all big nerds, so I’m not worried that their schoolwork will slip. It’s that if they play soccer, they’d pretty much have to drop everything else, and that’s not a sacrifice I want them to make.
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Yeah, sports is the single after-school activity. Jonah’s does CCD once a month on Monday nights, so he misses practice those nights. But he doesn’t do school play or instrument lessons. He plays Baritone horn at school and gets practice there. Not sure what Odyssey of the Mind is. I let him choose his after-school activities (except for CCD). I think all that’s icing on the cake. He likes soccer more than a school play. I don’t really care what he chooses, as long as he isn’t doing too much or I have to drive too far.
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Interesting! Where I live, I don’t see the athletics vs. academics divide for girls, just boys. Girls are still encouraged in sports, and it’s still seen as a route to college, but when push comes to shove academics get priority because no one—not parents and not coaches—is under any illusion that the girls (even really talented athletes) may someday make a living at it. There are parents and coaches who think their sons will make a living as a professional athlete. Girls are told to parlay their sports talent into the college scholarship that will give them the means to earn a living. Boys sometimes get the message that college sports can be parlayed into a professional sports career instead of a diploma.
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Right, so you can do “academic” extra-curriculars, or “artsy” extra-curriculars, or “cultural” extra-curriculars, or any combination of the three — or else you can play a sport.
Our girl scouts meets every other Thursday. Your CCD is one Monday per month. There is no sport where you go even as little as just once per week — let alone every other week or every month. It’s multiple meetings every week for 12 weeks, and then it stops until next year.
This is why you start to get sports cliques — after school, those are the only people you see for months at a time. Then, when the season ends, everyone is off doing other activities, except for your sports friends — so the only real choice is to pick up another sport for the next season. The sports/ non-sports schedules are so incompatible with each other that you really can’t help getting sucked into one or the other, exclusively.
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Odyssey of the Mind is similar to Destination Imagination. Creativity contests for young children and teens. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704694004576019462107929014.html
Total time suck for parents. They organize meetings, and then there’s the sequence of competitions (town, regional, state, national.) We’ve never taken part, but DI’s very popular in our area.
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Jonah’s still transitioning to this school district and hasn’t quite found his place yet, so his example isn’t typical. In our last town, he combined sports with robotics and scouts. If he did fall soccer, he might miss a lot of scout meetings for a few months, but then go back in the winter and spring. He’s thinking about joining Brain Busters and student gov’t this year, but hasn’t committed yet.
In high school, I was in a varsity sport year round, all four years, but still was in honors classes and other clubs. I couldn’t run for president of those clubs, but I still participated. I was an editor of the school yearbook, too.
Honestly, it is possible to combine sports with academics and even other activities, if it’s done right. You probably couldn’t combine sports with the schedule you’re describing, but we all make different choices. Shrug.
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In my high school, there were several kids (boys and girls) who did varsity in three sports plus were in the school musical and taking the harder classes (we didn’t have honors classes) and working part time. We had values and one of our values was being half-assed about a lot of different things.
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I’ve been thinking about this sports thing a lot in the last day or two. Remember this thread started out with the question of why are boys doing so badly in today’s economy? Are they less flexible somehow?
I have a theory that, when things get tough in the world of work, women (and girls) can pretty easily fall back on other things for their focus and self-esteem. They typically have rich social lives and can spend more time with friends and family, or can focus on their kids. If they’re not killing it at work for a while it doesn’t usually shred their self-esteem.
But the guys I know, when things go into downturn at work, focusing on their families or a hobby is not enough for them. They seem to overwhelmingly turn to sports. I know lots of adult men who’ve gotten way way way into crossfit, almost like it’s a cult. Or some arcane training program, or running a marathon or a tri.
Not sure why sports seem to “count” for these guys in a way that family stuff or hobbies don’t. I do know guys who don’t go down the sports route; for example the programmers who are writing the next big iPhone app in their free time. Or the guys whose hobby is essentially drinking. But the sports thing is super common.
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My daughter is turning freakin’ misanthropic lately, refusing to do anything that involves other kids her age. Ugh. I don’t think bullying is going on; I think she’s being pre-emptively porcupinish to avoid middle-school crap. Her only extracurricular thing is dance, which is 2 regular practices a week, plus extra dance and solo practice occasionally. Last night she was complaining that she “had only an hour for Tumblr” because she had so much homework. That’s the first time ever she has said this, and it’s only the 2nd week of 8th grade, so I am worried. 😦
E will do hockey, which will be weekends, but this is his first year. We also used to do DI (but that went … badly) and weekly visits to his psychologist, which I cannot bring myself to start again this fall.
I am torn between really wanting S and E to do another activity and wanting to cry at the idea of another day of being MomTaxi.
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I think crossfit will evolve into a cult the way Dianetics did.
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The contrast between Jonah’s sport and Jonah’s instrument is really striking. For the baritone, he gets some practice at school during the day, and that’s considered enough. For soccer, no way. (Comment not aimed at you, Laura, but what an asymmetry in expectations from the two activities).
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In my high school, there were several kids (boys and girls) who did varsity in three sports plus were in the school musical and taking the harder classes (we didn’t have honors classes) and working part time.
You went to High School with Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens?
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If he did fall soccer, he might miss a lot of scout meetings for a few months, but then go back in the winter and spring.
Of course, most of the girls who play soccer one season play basketball the next season, and field hockey the season after that. Those are the Mean Girls, and that in itself is enough to drive us away.
We have been happy to stay off of that merry-go-round (Although Eldest Raggirl is the tallest in her grade, making us a target for the hard sell from the basketball coach.) Apparently, for some people, “variety” consists of exploring each of the three different ways — foot, hand, and stick — to run down a field and get a ball into a goal.
In our ritzy school system, where it is generally assumed that anyone who wants to can get into a flagship state school (Rutger, Delaware, Penn State) academics is both important at a certain level, but also completely unimportant beyond that level. It is therefore easy to glide through on “good enough” and boost your credentials by taking an SAT prep class.
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I don’t think sports take more time than other activities, if you also commit to the idea that children should be physically active for 1-2 hours a day, every day. Doing sports for us means that we actually reach that level of activity for each child (one of which is a perpetual motion machine, the other had become sedentary until she discovered “her” sport — basketball, by the way).
I do see the incipient cliquiness you describe around sports (but, in our case, it’s mitigated by the fact that the private school kids live in different areas, and thus, do not play on the same teams). But, isn’t girl scouts a clique, too?
In my community, there’s no question that sports will be traded for academics. Other activities (and, most notably ones like girl scouts, where there’s no quantified objective, or DI, which has no obvious college CV benefits) suffer.
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Re raggirl and basketball (yes, I’m one of those mothers who scopes out the tall girls and tries to convince them to play basketball).
My excuse is that it’s basically been life-changing for my daughter. She had started to become “disconnected” from her body, becoming more sedentary, thinking that she wasn’t good at sports and thus (because she is a competitive kid) it wasn’t worth it. She hadn’t learned to push her body to do what she wanted it to do. Most concretely this was drifting over into her willingness to do other physical activities (for example, hiking, or walking around the city). I myself am a bad role model, so I feel like basketball has been big for her.
As the “tall girl” (which won’t last long), she learned that she could do something in basketball and it’s drifted into her comfort in her own body. Her physical role models are now the women she sees on the basketball court (the ones who look like women and not sticks and who can jump and run and do things).
My girl is also a “nerd” (she likes to read and write and do research projects), so I’m hoping this dose of organized sports means she’ll feel comfortable in her body going forward.
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I don’t think sports take more time than other activities, if you also commit to the idea that children should be physically active for 1-2 hours a day, every day.
It’s not that it’s “more time” (although if you are good enough to make the travel team, it really really is), it’s the way the time is structured. In terms of physical activity, that has not been nearly been as much as a problem as making sure I don’t burn them out, and allow enough down time. Meanwhile, there are lots of ways that fit into the non-team structure. There’s dance class. There’s gymnastics. Just last week I signed the younger two Raggirls up for 6 weeks of tennis lessons every Tuesday at 5 pm. (I have never played tennis in my life, but the intro lessons were cheap.)
But while you can do various sorts of athletic activities in ways that mesh into non-athletic life, those athletic activities that are also “team sports” somehow take on a life of their own, with their own hierarchies and time commitments and lifestyle. Kids sign up for fall soccer, and then drop out the next year when they realize that most of the kids also did spring soccer and summer clinic, and are suddenly twice as good as they are. The two directions are varsity high school or eventual drop out.
She had started to become “disconnected” from her body, becoming more sedentary, thinking that she wasn’t good at sports and thus (because she is a competitive kid) it wasn’t worth it.
That’s not the issues we’re dealing with. Tallest Raggirl seems to be owning her height, and turning in to a real Bossypants. Luckily, she is channeling that productively so far — she spent the summer writing, directing, filming, and editing a short movie with her 11-year-old friends. (She wants to go to NYU Film School.) “I’m not bossy. I’m the director!” We are doing well promoting self-esteem, but if it doesn’t get de-railed by impending puberty, the girl’s going to have to be told to sit down and shut up every once in a while.
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I get where you’re coming from, Ragtime. I think that you are mostly disgusted by the sports culture that exists in suburban communities. It was a big part of life in the working class suburb we came from, as well as this upper income suburb. The difference is that this town is really a small city and there is a large pool of kids, so one group doesn’t take over. (Schattsneider was totally right about expanding the sphere, if there are in pol sci nerds still reading this thread.)
I was on the edge of the soccer field waiting to pick up Jonah from practice and was eavesdropping on a conversation with parents who had older kids getting ready for college. They were bragging that their sporty kids were getting recruitment letters from coaches at big name colleges, even though their grades sucked. I didn’t say anything, but I was totally rolling my eyes.
You know what happens to the sporty kids with bad grades in college? Professors fail ’em. Fail ’em left and right. They don’t show up for class and tell thr professor that they couldn’t do the reading, because they had practice last night. Like we give a shit? They expect special treatment. One guy wanted me to give a test to his coach to administer, because he had to play a game down south. Uh, no. Fail, fail, fail. They think that college is their safety, because really they are going to end up on the Mets. Uh, no. Fail, fail, fail. They end up with no contract with the Mets, no college degree, and lots of debt. Morons. And their parents are morons, too.
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You know what happens to the sporty kids with bad grades in college? Professors fail ’em. Fail ’em left and right.
This was covered to great comic effect in I am Charlotte Simmons.
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I am the same anon as the last anon. I have thought about it some more, and believe that the passage where the basketball player (from New Jersey!) is explaining to some coach how he ended up in a class (Greek? philosphy? I forget) that was not on the unofficial “approved” list of classes for athletes, and the coach’s response, may be funniest Tom Wolfe passage I have ever read.
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I realized my last comment was the post of the converted, and then I realized that’s not actually what I wanted to say. It’s not that I recommend sports for everyone, but that I was reacting to the idea that the “end of men” was caused by sports.
Mind you, I haven’t yet seen the darker side for boys, and my impression is based on my eldest, a girl. No mother I know is imagining that the college recruitment is going to make up for her girl’s poor grades. They do imagine that they’ll get a leg up on admissions, at schools like Amherst or one of the Ivy’s (and, in some cases, they might, though it’s less likely in a sport like basketball, unless the girl is really tall, and not just a tall 11 year old).
Sports do require structure, but so would any activity practiced at a high level, and the structure and commitment is part of the point, the reason why these are good activities. Sports has concrete goals (run faster, stronger, higher, . . .), required teamwork, practice, winning and loosing, competition, functioning under pressure. Other activities can help children acquire those skills too (so I’m not saying sports above everything else), but that I do find sports teaching those values (in ways that academics doesn’t always).
This week’s basketball practice ended with a drill where the girls had to attempt free throws. If they missed, the whole team had to run sprints. Mind you, these girls do know how to shoot a free throw, so this wasn’t a plan for pure humiliation. It did, however, require the girls to perform under pressure for the benefit of the whole team. I think that’s a valuable skill to learn, and one that is important not just in basketball practice, or basketball games, but in lots of other activities.
Other activities might teach the same skills, but the teamwork/responsibility is not one that’s taught well in school, in my mind, even when schools sometimes try. That team practice might be bad for some kids, but not for mine (I also liked it that the coach told her to get over not liking the basket — it was apparently too bouncy).
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@bj,
“No mother I know is imagining that the college recruitment is going to make up for her girl’s poor grades.”
The gossip among the high school parents recently was the acceptance of a female athlete to an Ivy-equivalent college. Said athlete had never taken an honors course, again according to gossip.
Now, the high school tends to have honors courses in math and science. It is eye-opening, though, when the elite colleges accept more athletes than scholars.
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“The gossip among the high school parents recently was the acceptance of a female athlete to an Ivy-equivalent college. Said athlete had never taken an honors course, again according to gossip. ”
This isn’t the same thing as poor grades — it could be someone who has concentrated on serious sports over advanced academics (I classify poor grades differently, because poor grades mean you are participating poorly in academics, as opposed to balancing your life over a variety of demands). I’m guessing that Emma Watson & Michelle Kwan are also examples of women who concentrated on activities other than advanced academics and did well in college recruitment as well.
The “Ivy-equivalents” aren’t trying to build purely academic classes and after a person has met the requirements that they be able to do the work at the school, they include other characteristics in their evaluation (I know I’m not saying something you don’t know).
I think that those of us with an academic bentsometimes want to be judged purely on academics. But they’re not, and though I think my kids might benefit, I don’t think they should be. Most schools are not a purely academic environment; the schools are better for everyone if there is academic excellence, social ability, leadership, and, yes, sports too.
An exception is Caltech, which weights the multi-dimensionality of human experience with a huge advantage for the ability to do creative research at the expense of the many other talents and skills that make up a human. There might be other schools that also do so (with one talent or another), but the “Ivy-equivalents” aren’t them.
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Most schools are not a purely academic environment; the schools are better for everyone if there is academic excellence, social ability, leadership, and, yes, sports too.
I was responding to our host’s statement that many parents seem to think sports are a route to college acceptance. It pains me to admit they’re right. Students who take the academic route are held to much higher academic standards than athletes.
There are limits to the benefits. For example, when a university provides athletes with a list of easy courses, ( http://www.stanforddaily.com/2011/03/09/1046687/ ), is it not possible that this sort of admissions behavior leads to a student body composed of students who can do the work, and students who can’t? When a cheating scandal erupts at Harvard, no one is much surprised to find a certain percentage of the students under suspicion are athletes.
I do see the strength of holistic admissions. It’s a very durable model. On the other hand, it’s hard to see how the athletic recruits can keep up with the rocket scientists in the classroom.
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