From Juvenile Delinquency to Adult Crime: Criminal Careers, Justice Policy, and Prevention
cess of learning and competing for the sake of personal development. If children are learning that winning is the most important thing and that winning does not come easily or often, they may become so discouraged that they drop out, which may jeopardize the ability to bounce back from a loss and try again, a skill emphasized by parents. Children's responses also indicate that while parents may be focused on inculcating skills that will help them become successful adults, children are focused on becoming successful children, namely by cultivating a sense of belonging among their peers. While the adults in their lives may be focused on ranking and sorting them and urging them to be the very best, young children's responses reflect more relational values, ones that place greater emphasis on befriending children from other schools, supporting the talents of friends and teammates, and experiencing wins and losses as a group. Levey Friedman wonders if the impulse to avoid the pressures of individual competition works against the ability to learn to be comfortable with individualized evaluations, another key skill that parents emphasize. These moments of disconnect between parents' intentions and children's experiences contribute to an understanding of children as active participants and co creators of the social world around them, rather than an understanding of children as passive recipients of adult decisions. Playing to Win provides a systematic examination of the motivations and parenting strategies of affluent parents, as well as the structure and content of three competitive, organized children's activities. However, it is much more difficult to deliver as effective an analysis of the potential consequences of this type of pathway consumption for the children in the study. As Levey Friedman notes, it is difficult to know whether parents' strategies will yield the intended long term outcomes. Despite this understandable limitation, there are empirical claims that feel less robustly supported by the data than others and topics that are not directly addressed. For example, while generalist parents claimed that involving children in an array of activities helped children learn to balance multiple commitments, manage a schedule, and prepare their equipment at home in advance of competitions, there is scant evidence in the text to support the claim that this is what children are actually doing for themselves. Rather, the data suggest that parents do much of this work for their children. There is also a missed opportunity to address the link between these highly privatized investments in particular children and the large scale public disinvestment in children as a whole. The historical overview of the evolution of children's activities has the potential to speak to the way that 'proper care' has shifted away from being perceived as a collective responsibility, but the message that children are increasingly perceived as a privatized good rather than a social one remains implied.