My final Pint-Sized Phenoms installment of 2012 is indicative of the variety of overachievers that I’ve highlighted on this blog throughout the year. 1) Let’s start with the youngest: 9-month-old twins Ellie and William Trykush. These British babies made waves worldwide earlier this month when a video of them swimming the length of the pool [...]
It’s always great fun to see visual depictions and analysis of activities I’ve studied. Unlike Dance Moms, the drama in the recent documentary Brooklyn Castle isn’t manufactured. It brings an important story, and activity, to a broader audience– in a way not done since the 1993 movie Searching for Bobby Fischer. Below is my review [...]
Because of my research on kids and competition (especially beauty pageants and dance, which often bleeds into cheer, and athletics) and my own love of reading, I often read youth literature on these topics– which I’ve written about before. Most of the time this has meant Young Adult (YA) books, but more recently I’ve noticed [...]
Prodigies are always a hot topic, and with the publication of Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree, they have been back in the news. While prodigies tend to come from fields where it is not necessary to go through physical maturation first (like music, math, chess, etc.), that is beginning to change as some parents [...]
When I read Matt Richtel’s article, “The Competing Views on Competition,” last month in The New York Times I couldn’t stop thinking about what one of the chess moms I met told me while I was researching Playing to Win: “Raising kids is a big experiment and I won’t know till later if I did [...]
The past month or so has been pretty crazy in the Levey Friedman household– death, life, illness(es), first teeth, a hurricane and a nor’easter, Halloween, an election, the list goes on. Through it all I’ve attempted to keep writing, but the priority has been parenting the Little Man… especially after we lost our childcare in [...]
I learned a new term this month: “Chicked.” Apparently that’s what you say in skiing when a woman beats a man on the slopes. Here’s an excerpt from an article describing what it is to be chicked: “That’s a verb used in ski racing – chicked – to chick someone,” explained Canadian alpine racer Larisa [...]
We’re in the midst of multiple football seasons– Pop Warner, high school, college, and pros– and, like anything, we have some good and some bad stories. The bad stories focus on injuries and over-involved adults. Massachusetts and New England are no strangers to crazy youth sports parents and physical altercations (as I wrote about in [...]
CLICK HERE TO SEE MY THOUGHTS ON THE CONSEQUENCES OF PLACING CHILDREN IN THE PUBLIC EYE, AS THEY ORIGINALLY APPEARED ON THE HUFFINGTON POST! Alana Thompson and Malala Yousafzai are two seemingly vastly different young women who made headlines this past week. Yousafzai is a 15-year-old Pakistani activist who is recovering from an assassination attempt. [...]
Compared to the past few months, October brought less female athlete news– but as students returned to school and Olympic-caliber athletes returned to training, there’s no doubt that women in sports were hard at work. And, in many cases, they are working hard in new contexts. 1) In Massachusetts female high school golfers now have [...]
