Abby Quillen is convinced by Alfie Kohn, and in the full article, gives specific advice to parents about non-competitive parenting:

” Competition, which Kohn defines as any situation where one person can succeed only when others fail, seems to be something of a state religion in the United States. But Kohn is convinced that we’ve all bought into dangerous myths about the value of competition in our personal lives, workplaces, society, and economic system. He laid out his arguments in his 1986 book No Contest: The Case Against Competition, and he’s been spreading the word ever since.

He insists that competition is not human nature; it’s something we learn. “The message that competition is appropriate, desirable, required, and even unavoidable is drummed into us from nursery school to graduate school; it is the subtext of every lesson,” he writes.

And according to Kohn, competition undermines self-esteem, destroys relationships, thwarts productivity, and discourages excellence, and he cites more than a hundred studies to back up his assertions.

I didn’t play competitive sports, but I’m all too familiar with the academic awards assemblies Kohn rails against. During my 17 years in school, I marched onto stages to collect an assortment of shiny pins, engraved dictionaries, and gold-sealed certificates. Kohn argues that honors like the ones I won make the vast majority of students feel like losers. More surprisingly, he insists they’re just as toxic for the winners, arguing that my victories may have made me into a more “cautious, obedient” person.

I would like to disagree, except I see Kohn’s point. I remember feeling an almost absurd fear of academic failure, especially when I was very young; Kohn argues that it’s no surprise that getting good grades or winning awards would breed anxiety. “Winning offers no genuine comfort, because there is no competitive activity for which victory is permanent.”

Of course, the competitions didn’t end when I got home from school. Like most Americans, my childhood was crammed with kickball tournaments, family game nights, three-legged races, trivia contests, and scavenger hunts. When I think about it, a lot of those activities weren’t exactly fun, and many were downright stressful.

Kohn argues that growing up in a competitive society has dangerous implications. We can become almost psychotic in our inability to recognize when being competitive is harming us. “Having thoroughly assimilated the attitude that the better I do, the worse you do (and vice versa), we are not open to mutually advantageous agreement or cooperation of any kind. The costs can be high.” Think: nuclear war and environmental degradation.”