It’s been a busy week; and I suspect it will continue to get busier as I prepare for the release of Playing to Win– or at least I hope so! Before detailing those though, some thoughts on making all this work as a mom: On the day I did the two TV appearances described below, [...]
I’ve been writing so much lately, partly in preparation for the release of Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture (have I mentioned you can pre-order it now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or the University of California Press’ website?!), that I decided to do a writing round-up this week. These four different [...]
Every year around April 1st we get a wave of news coverage about college admissions. Even though research has not (yet) shown that attending an elite school means you’ll make more money, lots of other studies suggest that it does matter. Often the ways it matters are difficult to measure, but they include social networks [...]
So much ink has already been used up discussing one of the hottest books in recent memory, Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. For that reason I was hesitant to add my two cents, even though I had many thoughts while reading the book (Not the least of which was, “Wait, I feel like I do all [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
