Print this article Matt Feeney’s Little Platoons: A Defense of Family in a Competitive Age is a lucid, moving account of the pressures on contemporary American middle-class and upper-class families to assure their children’s success. Drawing on his experience as a father and on recent social science research, Feeney shows how competitive pressures are reshaping every aspect of family life. Preparing their children for interviews at highly selective preschools, helping them with ever-more intensive homework, and organizing their lives around the time-consuming demands of youth sports, parents are raising their children, and transforming themselves, in a struggle for economic and social status.