Today I woke up excited it was Friday– but then I realized I wouldn’t be getting a new episode of Cheer and I had to hit the snooze button to recover. Cheer, which has aired on CMT for the past six weeks, quickly became one of my favorite reality series, warming my normally analytical sociological [...]
Almost 9-months ago, right before my son was born, I blogged about how my work and my husband’s work would impact our parenting. Obviously so much in our lives has changed since then– yet much has remained the same. Various “family business” over the past week captures all of our various interests… and hint at [...]
If you’re anything like me, you and your family are facing a post-Olympics letdown. I have the perfect solution. No, not starting to play any Olympic sports. As I wrote last week, I’m more of a reader than a athlete. I recommend you and your kids crack open the bindings of some of these recent [...]
This blog originally appeared on the Gates Cambridge blog, A Transformative Experience, on July 29, 2012. I was a Gates Cambridge scholar at the University of Cambridge from 2002-2003. It truly was one of the most transformative experiences of my life from a personal and professional point of view. For many years after my time [...]
This originally appeared in The Huffington Post’s Culture Section. Write a bad mommy confessional and be rewarded with multiple weeks on bestseller lists, riches, and fame/infamy. (See: Chua, Amy [Tiger Mom]; Druckerman, Pamela [American mom, French parenting]; Weiss, Dara-Lynn [Diet Devil in Vogue]). And then there are the television shows. In the grand tradition of [...]
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 [...]
