Phyllis McGinley

THE housewife and writer Phyllis McGinley wrote these words in the early 1960s and they are more true today than ever. The phenomenon she discusses — the stress of children being made to excel early, and often, at a whole range of activities, including athletics, music, art and academics — is related, in my view, to other changes in family and community life, especially feminist careerism, materialism and low fertility. But more importantly, a society with no sense of the sacred cannot truly value leisure.

Youth is a perfectly wonderful commodity and far too valuable, as Shaw has pointed out, to be wasted on the young. Yet like all human benefactions, it has its penalties, which in today’s urgent society have frighteningly increased. I don’t think I am merely nostalgic when I contend that being a child nowadays is a tougher proposition than it was when my generation and I compared arithmetic answers between classes or devoured bread-and-pickle sandwiches on the front porch after school. For one thing, it isn’t as much fun.

On the surface this assertion may sound like gibbering nonsense. Never before in history has childhood had so much attention paid to its welfare and its amusement. It is cosseted, pampered, immunized against unhappiness as against polio or whooping cough.

 Also on the surface, its pattern of traditional play seems not have changed very much since my time …. But there is a difference in the way games are played.

That nimble child with the skip rope may not be bounding merely for the pleasure of physical activity. Perhaps she practices leaps so that at ballet class on Saturday morning she can  improve her tour jeté and be able to star in the spring show. There is a contest arranged for kite flyers, with cash awards donated for the winners by the chamber of commerce — so reeling a paper toy in and out of the sky is serious business.. The champion builder of snowmen has his picture in the paper. That ballplayer exercises his arm apprehensively. Will he or will he not be included in the Little League, where he and the rest of his team can own uniforms and a coach and listen to parents cheering from genuine grandstands? The swimmer vies for medals. Those vague dreams and rewards of “When I grow up” have suddenly become concrete goals, scaled to child’s size. The play has turned professional. And the ordinary competitive instinct of the young is being channeled into a frenzy of keeping up with, or learning to surpass, all the little Joneses in the neighborhood.

There is nothing wrong with healthy competition. But there is, it seems to me, something both wrong and unwholesome about harassing those below their teens into too early an insistence on success.

[Phyllis McGinley, Sixpence in her Shoe; Macmillan Co., New York; 1964]

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