Little Platoons

"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 to the most prestigious possible college looms as the long-term goal. Fearing their children will be left behind, parents look for advantage wherever they can.