Soccer Isn't for Girly-Girls? How Parents Pick the Sports Their Daughters Play
Girls today grow up in a world with an unprecedented set of educational and professional opportunities. More of them will graduate from college and earn advanced degrees than ever before, and all professions are open to them. Although the activities of girls and boys have converged over time, there are still distinctive paths for each sex, and many children's activities are still associated with particular aspects of feminine or masculine identity.
How do parents of girls navigate this often-difficult terrain? To answer this question, I'll focus on 38 families I met and interviewed who have at least one elementary school-age daughter currently involved in competitive chess, dance, or soccer. These families are a subset of the 95 families I met while researching Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture. Over the course of 16 months I interviewed nearly 200 parents, children, and teachers/coaches involved with these competitive after-school activities in six different organizations, three in the suburbs and three in an urban setting. While boys were also part of the larger study, what I found about girls and competition was especially intriguing for what it says about who these young women might grow up to become.
Unlike masculinity, multiple forms of femininity are seen as acceptable by parents and by children, so it's not surprising that different gender scripts emerged for each of the three activities. The names of these different gender scripts—"graceful," "aggressive," and "pink"—all came from language used by parents of girls in interviews. They help us understand how parents choose among different activities for their daughters.
Graceful Girls
When talking about why dance is good for their daughters, moms highlighted dance's ability to help their girls be graceful. One dance mom told me that dance produces good posture, which contributes to a more graceful appearance: "There are kids that you see in the studio and they walk in gracefully; there's
