This afternoon Owen competed in his first middle school track meet, so I stopped at the stadium to watch before I returned to school for my evening class. The nuclear family plus Harriet (the boys' maternal great-grandmother) turned out to watch him. We took Taylor out of school for the last hour so he could attend, and Josh showed up after his last class.

Owen ran a low-hurdle sprint and the 100-meter dash while I was there, but I had to leave before his main event, the 200-meter dash, where his long legs served him well; however, the long legs that lifted him lightly over the hurdles and smoothly along the two hundred didn't serve him as well in the 100-meter dash, where his long stride and slow turnover doomed him to the middle of the pack. He has the big puppy feet at the ends of loose-jointed, spindly legs right now, not the best anatomy for a power sprint.

Seventh graders competed with seventh graders, and eighth graders with eighth graders. There were probably twice as many heats for the seventh graders as there were for the eighth graders. I suppose that after a season of competition many of the kids begin to think that all this fun is too much work and they drop out. Or they realize that they just might not ever be capable of successfully competing with the best. Things become less possible and the kids resign themselves (too early, I think) to their places in the socio-biological pecking order.

This is, I realize, a dark view, but it is a justifiable view. If you ask a roomful of kindergarteners if they can draw or sing or dance, nearly every kid in the room will raise a hand affirming their talent and their pride in their ability. Ask the same question ten years later, and only a few will raise a hand.

Owen is twelve now and will turn thirteen within two weeks. I can't remember exactly how good it felt to be alive at twelve, but I recall (maybe mistakenly) feeling wonderful all the time at twelve. Parents were an embarrassing inconvenience, of course, but as far as I could tell at the time, they were the only source of limits in a kid's life.

Throughout elementary school, Owen was the fastest kid in school from the third grade on. Performing now in the larger arena of middle school, Owen must work harder to compete successfully. Within the family, he must feel some pressure as Taylor comes up behind him, the third grade spelling champ, and as of today, the holder of his elementary school's record for pullups for the second year running. But sibling rivalries are a different matter. I want Owen to continue to enjoy the sense of limitless prospects that characterizes childhood, but I'm not sure that competition is the way to go for him, even when he has competed successfully, as he did today.

I know the arguments favoring competition. I'm just whining a bit as I clutch at a fond hope for him, and because I can guess at the reasons that so many of the other kids drop out of the program after seventh grade: The reality -- of competition, of large numbers, of Darwinian biology at its temporarily most unfair -- sets in, and the horizon no longer lies way over there in a freshly mown meadow in the middle of a warm Saturday afternoon somewhere in the distant future, but right over there, on the other side of an airless room, where flat, fluorescent light disguises the time of day.

The job of a parent is to raise the child to the limited self-sufficiency that we recognize as the beginning of adulthood with some fingers, toes, and eyes intact. But it would be nice if we could also do a better job of preserving the kid's impulse to raise a hand.