Summary and response - Essay Example

As a function of this level of profusion and the effects that it has on the individual, Jessica Statsky writes in her essay, “Children Need to Play, Not Compete” that this societal understanding and drive towards competition is ultimately extremely harmful. As a function of analyzing this piece, the following few paragraphs will seek to provide a summary of some of Statsky’s main ideas and draw inference upon the strength and tenor of these ideas. Ultimately, as the title implies, Statsky discusses the fact that competition is harmful to the means by which a child should develop.

Instead of allowing this type of competitive streak to define the way in which children are raised, Statsky offers that a far more reasonable approach is to allow nature to take its course and allow children to develop at their own place through play. Although play has oftentimes been mischaracterized as a waste of time, the fact of the matter is that Statsky, as well as a host of other child psychologists and developmental specialists, point to the fact that play serves an integral role in helping to develop a host of interactional and developmental goals within the child; goals that Statsky argues could never be realized within the unnatural and contrived realm of competition that children are all too often thrust into. . Ultimately, long before reading Statsky’s piece, the reader came to an understanding that the unimaginative nature of competitive sports has served to constrain the abilities of children and harness their otherwise eager and unbridled sense of wonder and discovery.

Due to the fact that the child is unable to integrate the differential between the overall importance of winning and the overall importance of understanding the more nuanced aspects of human behavior are not emphasized. This is of special importance due to the fact that the scope and importance of whatever sport is being engaged in is lost uon the child as the act of winning and losing becomes the sole drive that motivates the participant and defines the importance of reality(Statsky 3). Further, it is the understanding of this particular reviewer that one of the most negative aspects of the means by which competition integrates itself with the child is with relation to the fact that the child is oftentimes first integrated with the rules and understanding of competitive sport prior to being made aware of the rules that constrain society and morality in general.

This of course represents the primal case of getting the priorities of life confused; thereby adding to a faulty and flawed understanding of the way in which individuals should prioritize and relate to one another. The reader should understand that although not all competitive sport is necessarily bad, the use of competitive sport as a means of educating children with regards to the realities of life and the means by which they should integrate with one another is fundamentally flawed. In such a way, it is the strong belief of this author that the ideas that were put forward by Statsky were precisely correct in