Much has been said about the probable “death” of Slot Car Racing and indeed most traditional hobbies once the current generation of over-40 participants have passed on or lost their hand-eye skills.
The reasoning is that the current generation of teens are not interested in “maker” hobbies, but would rather immerse themselves in the virtual world of computer gaming, etc. I don’t doubt that in some cases this may be true- but as a blanket assumption I have to be skeptical.
I have witnessed young people from pre-teens to early 20’s discover and enjoy 3-D games of skill such as non-video arcade games and slot car racing at birthday parties and kids racing events. Based on the response that I see, there must be some degree of interest out there by young people.
So why aren’t more adolescents taking up “hobbies”? Why are hobby shops and raceways closing due to declining business?
One possible and probable reason lies with the changing demands being made on children as soon as they reach school age.
In response to things like the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, state preschool standards, a general emphasis on testing, and then the introduction of Common Core standards, the preschool and kindergarten landscape has changed enormously. Social time and play have been sacrificed in preschool to keep up with academic expectations for kindergarten readiness.
Teachers’ academic expectations of kindergarteners in 2010 were far higher than they had been in 1998, a trend that seems to on the rise. For example, today’s Common Core kindergarten math standards include “construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others,” and reading skills include “read emergent-reader texts with purpose and understanding.”
Elementary school students have seen an increase in homework over the past twenty years. Some schools even assign homework in kindergarten. A parent asked her son’s teacher why homework was being assigned in kindergarten, the teacher responded, “So they will be ready for homework in first grade.”
Beginning in preschool and continuing throughout primary school, children’s days are now more rigidly structured. Opportunities for self-direction, social exploration, and discovery are increasingly lost to direct instruction in the core curriculum, which is often driven by the schools’ focus on preparing students to meet state testing requirements. Meanwhile, instead of neighborhood children finding one another after school and engaging in free and unstructured play, children have after-school activities like music lessons, team sports, tutoring, and other structured and supervised activities.
Studies have found that children’s participation in unstructured play between 1981 and 1997 has decreased, while time spent in school went up 18%, and time spent doing homework went up 145%.
In addition to increasing school time and homework, children of many educated parents with means, instead of afternoons and weekends spent hanging out with friends or pursuing hobbies, non-school time is increasingly used to cultivate skills that will allow those children to stand out later on in the college admissions game.
It’s no wonder that parents work so hard to plan their children’s time. What eight-year-old has the foresight to play the tuba or girls’ golf—activities that might make them more attractive to colleges? What thirteen-year-old has the organizational skills and forward thinking (not to mention transportation plan) to follow the advice of The Princeton Review, which urges students to increase their appeal to colleges by picking one community-service activity in junior high school and sticking with it year after year, volunteering no less than two hours a week every week through their senior year?
It has become much more difficult to gain admission to the top U.S. universities. For example, in the 1980s and ’90s, Yale’s acceptance rate hovered around 20%. By 2003, the admission rate was down to 11% and in 2017 it was 7%. So it makes sense that parents have increasingly teamed up with their children to help them pack their pre-college resumes with relevant extracurricular activities.
It’s what former Yale English professor William Deresiewicz calls “the resume arms race,” and “any family that doesn’t come together to play the game puts their child at a disadvantage. “The only point of having more,” Deresiewicz explains in his book Excellent Sheep, “is having more than everybody else. Nobody needed 20,000 atomic warheads until the other side had 19,000. Nobody needs eleven extracurriculars, either—what purpose does having them actually serve?—unless the other guy has ten.”
The college admissions process nowadays makes it harder for high school students to enjoy school and pursue intrinsic fulfillment. The process “warps the values of students drawn into a competitive frenzy” and “jeopardizes their mental health,”
The conclusion is that the age group that in the past had free time to pursue hobbies is now over scheduled and overwhelmed with literally no time for free play or for anything that cannot be documented as favorable to their college admissions resume.
Adding to this is the requirement is that attending a slot car racing event can in many cases be an all-day affair in itself, and slot car racing usually requires time spent in the form of building and testing prior to the event. This can represent a substantial investment of time that many children (and their parents) these days just do not have to spare.
I could throw in the complication of the rise of the single parent family being a negative factor for children’s hobbies, but I don’t have any information to support this one way or another.
One thing that may be working in our favor is that there is an emerging trend these days away from the automatic goal of college after high school. Some students are considering a few years of work after high school and before college or pursuing the more cost effective path of vocational schools.
I don’t know if there is a blanket cure for attracting more young people to hobbies and to slot car racing in particular.
“Arrive and Drive” series such as the Mid-American Kids Racing program provide young participants and their parents with pre-built racing cars and controllers eliminating the time spent building and testing race cars.
It has yet to be determined if children participating in arrive and drive programs become interested enough to purchase their own equipment and start a conventional racing program. Early indications, at least in the above mentioned Kids Series seem to indicate that they do not.
Many parents seem to be impatient when events do not start on schedule so this is something that shop owners and race program directors would be advised to aware of when when racing programs are geared toward kids. In almost all cases kids need to depend on adults for transportation because the days of children walking or riding a bike to the raceway or hobby shop have gone by the wayside. This is largely due to safety concerns in the wake of heavily publicized kidnappings and or murders of young people left unsupervised.
Getting the parents involved by turn marshaling or helping with lane changes seems in my opinion to be more desirable than having the adults assuming a more passive role.
It may seem like I have written a lot here but I actually have cut it down quite a bit before posting here. I wish I could have brought it down to a couple of paragraphs but it probably wouldn’t have made much sense.
So what are your thoughts and experiences with introducing today’s children to hobbies and slot car racing? What have you found produces a growth in the number of racers and what does not?
Talk among yourselves.
I bet you can catch some air going over the bridge if you're not careful!
