Little Platoons: A Defense of Family in a Competitive Age

"Middle-class American life is defined by relentless competition among families, waged from elite preschools to youth sports to selective universities. The lengths to which parents will go to give their children a leg up have become notorious: ostentatious birthday parties to wow the neighbors, fistfights on the soccer sidelines over playing time, criminal conspiracies to cheat at college admissions. Such excesses make it easy to say that parents must just calm down and act more reasonably. But this simplistic advice misses the deep social dynamics that draw today's well-meaning parents into an endless race against other families, says Matt Feeney, a political theorist and an anxious stay-at-home father of three. In Little Platoons, he identifies and explains these powerful forces, and he urges parents to reawaken to families' unique social role and recognize their singular potential as a source of resistance. Today's parents, Feeney shows, operate within self-sustaining feedback loops of competitive worry. Their natural vigilance turns into a fixation on worst-case scenarios about their children's future prospects in an uncertain world. All around them, they see their worried fellow parents adopt an intensive approach to parenting, in which admission tothe most prestigious possible college looms as the long-term goal. Fearing their children will be left behind, parents look for advantage wherever they can. They scramble for entry into competitive preschools, sit with their kids through long hours of homework, hit the road every weekend for sports tournaments, and buy phones and tablets marketed as essential to success. In so doing, parents feel no choice but to set aside their own priorities and values; they alter their lives and the inner workings of their homes to suit the needs and whims of schools, sports leagues, social media companies, and college admissions officers. The web of voluntary associations that once made civil society a bulwark of liberty has become, instead, a series of gatekeepers who demand compliance in exchange for small margins of advantage. In the face of all of this, Feeney argues, families are politically invaluable. At its best, the intense solidarity of family life fosters an alternative set of values and sources of meaning. If we remember this, families offer a standpoint from which to critique and to reject our hyper-competitive, zero-sum society and the inhuman, implacable, indifferent systems that shape it. Blending original reporting, penetrating social analysis, and humorous, self-deprecating stories of Feeney's own struggles to stay calm as a parent amid the absurdities of Bay Area tech-boom, Little Platoons is unexpected and essential reading for anyone raising kids today"--
This eye-opening book brilliantly explores the true roots of over-parenting, and makes a case for the vital importance of family life.Parents naturally worry about the future. They want to prepare their children to compete in an uncertain world. But often, argues political philosopher and father of three Matt Feeney, today's worried parents surrender their family's autonomy to gain a leg up in this competition.In the American ideal, family life is a sacred and private sphere, distinct from the outside world. But in our hypercompetitive times, Feeney shows, parents have become increasingly willing to let the inner life of the family be colonized by outside forces that promise better futures for their kids: prestigious preschools, "educational" technologies, youth sports leagues, a multitude of enrichment activities, and -- most of all -- college. A provocative, eye-opening book for any parent who suspects their kids' stuffed schedules are not serving their best interests, Little Platoons calls us to rediscover the distinctive, profound solidarity of family life.