Dance Moms and the Culture of Success

The American Dream. Kind of.

Anyone can make it to the top. They just need to have drive and determination and someone to verbally abuse them for four to six hours a day. This is a key component of the American myth and of the popular reality TV show Dance Moms.

If you are not familiar, the show is not really about the dance moms, but about the dance teacher. The star of this particular reality fiasco is Abby, a large woman who screams and yells at 6- to 10-year-old girls trying to make them better dancers. She is never satisfied, and will often critique even first-place performances. She is a firm believer in Ricky Bobby’s belief that if you’re not first, you’re last. Every week, she rates the girls on a pyramid from top to bottom. She even yells at the girls for crying when they can’t take it anymore. And to top it all off, she thinks up cray cray routines in which the girls are wielding pistols or dressed as showgirls. Seven-year-old showgirls people. 

And the thing you can’t quite believe is that these mothers actually sign their daughters up for this abuse. I mean what could possibly be worth all of this? And then you see them dance. They are ridiculously good. Best in the country good. And suddenly you find yourself wishing that you had had some horrible, horrible person screaming at you for your entire childhood. Because that’s what we think it takes in America to be fantastic. That’s why this woman can get away with all of her awful shenanigans. We really believe that an emotional beatdown is part of the formula for success. 

Future Olympian

Am I wrong? Because a part of me certainly believes that all of these people who are really, really amazing at something, have in some way suffered for that success. They practiced that piano for hours on end, and somewhere there was a stern taskmaster smacking them on the knuckles with a ruler. Don’t lie. When you imagine Steve Jobs in that garage creating Apple, don’t you imagine some sort of Russian nursemaid shouting that he’s inadequate the whole time? I attribute a good portion of my academic success to my first grade teacher, Sister William Francis who scared the ever loving crap out of me and taught me to read like nobody’s business. To this day I am really unclear how it is that people can manage not to do their homework. I was always terrified not to. 

And I’m pretty sure I internalized some of that crazy. Or maybe some of us just have an inner Eastern European. The fact that I am even slightly well balanced is due to the fact that my parents are wacky hippy types. I remember my freshman year of high school when I told my dad I was in the top 10 (sixth in my class at that point). My dad said “don’t forget to have fun,” and I thought to myself, well screw you. But, I keep coming back to that idea. Is my life fun? Am I having a good time? Am I going to look back in 30 years and wish that I had thought more about enjoying life and not just tackling it?

I wish we could put that idea back into American schools, like in the 80s and 90s when we decided to bolster students’ self-esteem and make learning fun. Someone somewhere decided that shouting in kids’ faces and literally hitting them with sticks was not the way to create the kind of people we wanted around. I mean, how many psychologically scarred and freaked out geniuses can one country stand? Maybe soon people will remember that we don’t get that excited by people who can bubble things in either.