Line between activity for fun or money

I watched football on television the other night. As might be expected, there were star player biographies, manicured young women with microphones interviewing coaches field-side, plugs for the program's sponsor (Nike) and cheerleaders in thigh-skimming skirts.

What was unusual about the program was that the players were teenagers and the game was nationally televised, a California high school game I could see in New York. The players' on-camera biographies were a bit abbreviated; what kind of history does a 15-year-old have, after all? And the cheerleaders were not merely trussed up to look like teenagers - they were bona fide underage.

Football games aren't the only children's competitions now being broadcast nationally. So are spelling bees (this year the national championship was broadcast on ABC) and Little League championship games (also on ABC). There has also been a recent spate of reality and variety television shows centering around child performances. On "America's Got Talent," 11-year-old Bianca Ryan won $1 million this summer for singing a Jennifer Holliday song as if she were a 50-year-old musical theatre vet.

Live telecasting

Televising youth championships on ABC, Fox Sports, NBC, MTV and ESPN blurs the line between activity for fun and activity for money. School football teams are reputed to earn from $2,000 to tens of thousands a game: one coach estimated in an article in this paper that Nike had invested $20,000 a year in his team and that the team had sometimes kept thousands in concession revenues.

The networks also pay for the teams' travel - in one instance, travel in a private jet. Sponsors of football and Little League, which include makers of not-so-sporting processed foods like Snapple and Kellogg's Frosted Flakes, also stand to profit.

But what's particularly dubious about these televised competitions is the culture of competition they reflect and foster.

That culture can be one that produces phantom economics and promises stardom, like we see on wealth-saturated youth reality shows like "Laguna Beach." But it is also a more conventional kind of rivalry, revealing children at their moments of triumph and failure to millions of people. Forever, these media-ready competitors will have to carry the legacy of having been either humiliated by the broadcast of their losses or frozen in the inflated image of their wins.

Prioritising commercials

During one nationally televised high school football game I watched, the commercials between plays - for a male weight-loss formula and a cream that promised to prevent balding, for example - seemed to indicate that the viewers were on the antique side of youth, perhaps frozen into a state of mind of their own: nostalgia, perhaps nostalgia for the future that adult viewers had imagined for themselves in the past.

But one way or another, grown-up viewers of televised youth competitions find themselves contorted into an odd position. We become talent agents, recruiters and connoisseurs of precocity, judging the young competitors on their seamlessness and, ironically, how un-childlike they are.

As one judge said to Bianca Ryan in front of millions of viewers, if she just changed her shoes, her hair and her dress, she would win the competition. In other words, if she became more adult-looking - varnished herself into a post-pubescent chanteuse - she would win.

Youth competitions can certainly have positive effects. They can expand children's social worlds, make them feel less isolated and give them a sense of mastery and discipline. But when TV cameras are added to the mix, the stakes can change. At televised competitions, I have seen children turn their faces away from the cameras so that their tears wouldn't be visible - the pathos of the losers when forced to confront the winners being filmed.

Even some of the winners responded with self-consciousness. Watching this happen in real time convinced me that high school football games, spelling bees and other pageants and competitions of youth should be witnessed in actual fields, halls and stadiums rather than on television sets.

Childhood is ostensibly a more private period of life than adulthood. By that logic, camera crews shouldn't be trailing the winners and losers of children's contests. After all, youth contests are meant, at best, to excite children to learn and to practice, not to be the beginning of their relationships with recruiters, publicists and media trainers.

(New York Times)