At school in New York, any whiff of competition is firmly avoided. Not so at my six-year-olds’ summer tennis camp
There’s a game I play with my children that we never tire of, in which I share details – outlandish, unimaginable – of how things were in the olden days, when I was their age. Most of their favourites are safety related: no bike helmets, no car seats, no grownup in attendance when we walked to the shops. A few of them are monetary (the halfpenny sweet; 10p from the tooth fairy). Occasionally, it’s a food thing – milk floats; the horror of being denied a second dinner if we didn’t like the first – and of course, there’s a whole chapter on tech and rotary phones. There’s also a category of experience I don’t share with my children because, like smoking, they would simply find it too shocking. One of these is PE.
Suburban schools in the US still lean heavily into competitive sports, but that is not the case in New York. At my children’s elementary school, it is hard to imagine an event like sports day taking place, in which unsporty children are made to compete and come last in front of the entire school. (There is an annual fun run, organised for fundraising purposes, at which kids trip over their own feet while running in different directions and, like something from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, nobody actually wins). They might play dodgeball in the gym, but the kids themselves don’t pick teams, avoiding the spectacle of the same one being picked last every week. The “ugh” sound, from the team that ended up with them by default, is a memory from childhood that never quite fades.