Testing and Tiaras are back. Earlier this month TLC’s Toddlers & Tiaras returned with new episodes in Season 5. And last week Toddlers & Tiaras “superstar” Eden Wood premiered her own show on Logo; Eden’s World follows Eden into her post-pageant retirement life (which still involves pageants– as she and her mom serve as child [...]
This first appeared on Moms Team Blog (The Trusted Source for Sports Parents) on April 9, 2012 as part of April’s National Youth Sports Safety Month. To read it on their website click HERE. As a sociologist my work has focused primarily on the family and the educational system, two powerful institutions in childhood socialization. [...]
This article originally appeared on The Huffington Post Books. “My life has been one big audition.” This is the first line of Elizabeth Eulberg’s latest young adult novel, Take a Bow [Scholastic, April 1, 2012]. Take a Bow follows four young performers–two songwriters, one singer, and an actor–through their senior year at the fictional New [...]
Lifetime’s Season 2 of Dance Moms continues to get sillier and sillier as the contrivances spin out faster than a terrible fouetté turn. What can you say when Kendall leaves Abby’s studio and ends up at Candy Apples in Ohio besides, “Yeah, right! Producer interference!” in Episode 8, “The Runaway Mom?” And Abby’s decision to [...]
Watching Dance Moms and Toddlers & Tiaras is always interesting for me– both because the shows are often entertaining (if only in a horrifying way, like the recent T&T episode that featured Heaven, a modern day Violet Beauregarde with her incessant gum chewing, and Honey Boo Boo child and her TLC crossover extreme couponing momma [...]
A feature story I wrote on afterschool math enrichment centers appeared in today’s The Boston Globe Magazine. You can read it online (and see additional links below) by clicking here! I researched and wrote this in the last month or so of my pregnancy, so joke that now I know which math programs my son [...]
I know Amanda Scott as a fellow Gates Cambridge Scholar. But I can’t run like her! A very impressive person. CLICK HERE TO READ THIS ARTICLE ON BLOGHER SPORTS! 2012 is not only a leap year, it’s an Olympic year. That means that in the next few months thousands of hopefuls are gearing up for [...]
This post was happily featured on Babble on April 18, 2012 as the post I am most proud of us a mom! One week ago I gave birth to our precious son, Carston Cook Levey Friedman. We have been affectionately referring to him as Little Man. During labor I spent a good amount of time [...]
ETA: On January 4th, 2012 we welcomed our son, Carston, into the world. Two days later, his daddy’s research on value-added teachers appeared on the front page of The New York Times. Coincidence?! Everyone is doing well and no one has been fired yet! I was correct (per original post below) that this work would [...]
I have a soft spot for scholastic chess. In 2005 I started studying chess as part of my dissertation research (which is forthcoming as Playing to Win: Raising Kids in a Competitive Culture). One of the things I loved the most about the chess scene is the diversity of people who meet and engage over [...]
