Last week a diverse collection of Boston-area star made headlines. Ben was the Oscar winner. Tom was the superstar team player. And Lil Poopy was the music prodigy. Who is Lil Poopy? Read on… Lil Poopy, aka Luie Rivera Jr., is a 9-year-old resident of Brockton, Mass. The fourth grader, who earned his stage name [...]
Last week it was the teens, but this week it’s a group of nine-year-olds who are so special they had to get their own post. Their varied interests show how kids can find a passion and love in many different areas. 1) Quvenzhané Wallis- Wallis is the youngest nominee for Best Actress at the Academy [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Last Friday a feature story I wrote about the Maddy Verst custody trial appeared on Slate’s Double X. You may recall that I also wrote about the now six-year-old Maddy last fall after she appeared on the cover ofPeople. Like many others, including hundreds of pageant moms, I think the TLC series Toddlers & [...]
If last summer was The Summer of the Stage Mothers, this summer is The Summer of Dance (although if you watched Oxygen’s reality show The Next Big Thing about Trapper Felides, a famous children’s performance coach in NYC, you would know the stage moms are still lingering– as are the Dance Moms on Lifetime). Actually [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Princess means that you’re a loser! A lot of feminists might agree with this sentiment– especially with the recent release of Disney’s newest princess targeted at the preschool set, Sofia the First. But it was a child beauty pageant mom who uttered this line during the continuing fourth season of TLC’s Toddlers & Tiaras, which [...]
