I'm an All-Around Gymnastics Fan: My events include reading, watching, commenting, and writing

I'm a big women's gymnastics fan. Knowing I love dance, sports, and nearly all things feminine and strong, this should come as no surprise.  If you know me it's also no surprise that while I took gymnastics as a kid I didn't last long.  I was flexible, but I was also fearful (I would think to myself, "Why should I risk falling off that beam when I can read a book about someone else on the beam?"). It's been a thrilling 24 hours for fans of USA gymnastics, with the women's team winning the team gold in decisive fashion.

As Aly Raisman and Gabby Douglas prepare to compete in the All-Around competition I've been preparing for my own All-Around gymnastics meet.  My best event is the first- reading- and I'm really trying to up my game in the last event- writing.

1) Reading- Every four years the gymnastics shelf at the library gets restocked.  This year the bookshelf is especially full (likely due to the continued popularity of Nastia Liukin, Alicia Sacramone, and Shawn Johnson from the last Games) for both kids and adults.

First is Donna Freitas' Gold Medal Summer, which I especially enjoyed knowing Freitas is a professor (of religion).

The message of Gold Medal Summer-- that you should pursue your dreams and not give them up for romance-- is a good one for young girls (especially because the romance still comes eventually).  The protagonist, 14-year-old Joey, has an interesting back story with her sister and family which gives the book more layers than the typical middle school activity-romance-friends storyline.

Two new series about young girls doing gymnastics are also aimed at young readers.  The McKenna American Girl books, which I've written about before (and which has now been made into a movie, discussed more below) are better for the elementary school crowd. 1996 Olympic gold medalist Dominique Moceanu lends her name and expertise to another new series, The Go-for-Gold Gymnasts, aimed at middle-grade readers.  My favorite was Book 2, Balancing Act, because it obviously is meant to reflect some of Moceanu's own experiences as the child of Romanian immigrants.

I also liked that Moceanu and Thompson present important, and often overlooked, aspects of gymnastics in Balancing Act. They highlight that earning an NCAA scholarship is a worthy and important goal for many gymnasts-- that the Olympics aren't the end-all-be-all for most.  They also highlight that there are many hidden costs associated with competitive gymnasts (it's not just tuition and fees but also ace bandages and ice packs and hair accessories).  The characters aren't as nuanced as they are in Freitas' book, but the background knowledge is a bit deeper. The New York Times Book Review ran a review of the series and Freitas' book if you're interested in more comparisons.  I thought the observation that these particular books do not portray typical stage parents of the main characters is right on, but stage moms do make appearances in other parts of the stories.

In addition to her fictional series Moceanu also just released her memoir, Off Balance.  Readers get a sense of her gymnastics training along with an often shocking look at her family life-- including the discovery of a long-lost sister.  If you've been watching the Olympics and wondering why Bela Karoyli never mentions Dominique's name, you'll find out why he doesn't by reading Off Balance.

A different new memoir about gymnastics provides some insight as to why people like me-- non-gymnasts-- get so into the sport. Dvora Meyers' ebook Heresy on the High Beam: Confessions of an Unbalanced Jewess, is a quirky look at how love of a childhood sport can continue throughout young adulthood and offer continuity through unstable life stages.

Another quirky, recent book is My Father's Dream of an Olympic Trampoline: Life Story of George Nissen, written by Nissen's daughter Dagmar. Because it's written by his daughter the tone is a bit over-laudatory.  But it was fascinating to read about how the trampoline was invented and marketed (and how it got its name from Nissen's time in Mexico). I also found it fascinating how Nissen's experiences as a gymnast and as a diver helped create the trampoline, now used for training in both (if you've been watching the springboard and platform diving you know how acrobatic the divers are).

Why did I include a book about trampolining here? Well it's not just artistic gymnastics that's included in the Olympics, there is also rhythmic gymnastics and trampolining.  Yes, trampolining is its own sport in the Olympics as of 2000.  I'm actually very excited to watch the Olympic trampolinists who perform some truly out of this world high-flying tricks.

2) Watching- Speaking of watching I try to give my reading eyes a rest by watching television.  In addition to coverage of the sport itself (from nationals to Trials to the Olympics) there have been two different television specials about gymnastics.

The first is McKenna Shoots for the Stars, based on the American Girl books. Despite an all-star cast-- including the somewhat head-scratching trio of Nia Vardalos, Ian Ziering, and Cathy Rigby-- the movie is cringe worthy at times thanks to an overly saccharine and staged feel.  I actually laughed out loud when McKenna, upset about an injury, melodramatically rips her gymnastics posters off her wall.  You can get a taste of it from the trailer if you watch around 1:13.

A more interesting take was a three-part, two-hour long documentary on Aly Raisman, Quest for Gold [now achieved!] shown on the Comcast network (you can also watch all of it in chunks on the website Gymnastike).  I fell in love with Aly's father and brother while watching the last part of the documentary.  There's a great scene of them watching Aly at Nationals (only her mother went with her to that competition while the rest of the family stayed in Massachusetts) and yelling at the TV for her to stick.  If you haven't seen the now viral video of her mom and dad watching her compete bars in Olympic team prelims then you're missing out.

One television show is glaringly absent from my line-up and that's ABC Family's Make It or Break It. I don't have anything against the network (as you know, I've been watching Bunheads), but I never got into this show-- probably because I didn't love the inspiration for it, the movie Stick It.

3) Commenting- While I've converted my husband to the dark side of emotional gymnastics viewing it's still great to commune with other fans via message boards and Twitter.  My favorite gymnastics blog is Get a Grip. The author also puts together the wickedly clever and funny Gym Memes.

I tweet about gymnastics fairly often and I love reading comments from gymnastics commentators and expert fans. I put together a public list of those who provide some of the best insight.

While this seems like the shortest event for me (the vault of my All-Around fan experience, if you will), it actually takes up quite a bit of time!

4) Writing- In addition to tweeting and blogging I do write articles.  Researching a recent short piece on Brestyan's American Gymnastics Clubs (that appeared in July's Boston Magazine as "From Coddled Kids to World-Class Gymnasts") was great fun because I actually got to see both Aly Raisman and Alicia Sacramone train (for the record they were both vaulting while I watched and Aly also worked on her beam set-- which she'll now be competing on in the Olympic event finals!).  I was professional on the outside, but fangirl-y on the inside.

It's been wonderful to see Aly share her gold medal with Mihai Brestyan who is clearly a dedicated, but level-headed, coach.  Even during such a busy time Mihai spoke with me for over an hour impressing me with his thoughts on developing young talent in the US.  One important point that didn't make it into the printed article is that Bretyan knows not everyone is an Aly or Alicia. He emphasizes NCAA gymnastics as a wonderful outlet, and as a way for families to recoup all they have invested monetarily in gymnastics over the years in the form of a four-year college scholarship.  Local news is already reporting families with young girls flocking to the gym in Burlington.  While their daughters might not end up as Olympians, or even college athletes, parents should know that Brestyan will help mold their daughters into all-around people.

And All-Around fans like me will enjoy watching from the sidelines.

Tiger Teachers: The New Stage Moms Aren't the Moms (from Huffington Post Culture)

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 stage mothers we have the women of Toddlers & Tiaras, along with Dance Moms and Dance Moms: Miami. Is it any surprise that Skating Moms is in the works? And that the mothers on these shows are getting wackier and wackier to secure appearances on TMZ and Anderson Cooper in order to claim their 15 minutes of fame? Or, better yet, the holy grail -- their own television shows (like two Toddlers & Tiaras break-out stars: Eden Wood with her Logo network show Eden's World and Alana Thompson, aka "Honey Boo Boo Child," who has just inked a deal for a family reality show on TLC)!

Despite their extreme antics at this point it's a total cliché to criticize these moms. The people who really should make us scratch our heads are the other adults involved: the teachers and coaches.

Now, Abby Lee Miller, the larger-than-life teacher of Dance Moms, helps give female coaches a bad name. While she has surely amplified some of her behavior for the cameras you still can't help but wince as she verbally berates young girls, puts them in completely age-inappropriate attire, and shows them how to "paint on" a six-pack so they look more slender on stage.

Miller's actions have impacted other teachers and coaches. Prominent, successful, competitive dance teachers are appalled by her behavior. In addition to being embarrassed by a member of their own profession, they have seen changes in their enrollments and in their students' behavior, along with that of the children's moms. Let's just say that drama and raised voices seem to be becoming normalized.

While Abby Lee Miller isn't the first teacher or coach to over-invest in her students (watch the US gymnastics championships this weekend to catch a glimpse of coaching legends like the Károlyis -- and then read Dominique Moceanu's new memoir, out next week, to discover what a negative impact coaches like that can have on a child's life), Miller certainly is popularizing the role. In many ways she's the new version of a "stage mom."

CLICK HERE TO KEEP READING AT HUFFINGTON POST!

The most recent episode of Dance Moms, "The Battle Begins," has Abby shouting multiple times that her students need to do well because they are associated with her and "her name." With kids' afterschool activities becoming increasingly professionalized, more and more people (both good and bad) can make a living off of children's performances. This means they can easily become too invested both financially and emotionally.

So in many cases teachers and coaches are the new "stage moms," using kids who aren't their own to secure their own fame and fortune. Forget the Tiger Mom, now we have Tiger Teachers eager to catch the glare of the spotlight. Too bad we can't all get a Coach Taylor for ourselves and for our kids. In the meantime, beware of Tiger Teachers seeking high fees and reality television shows.

Life Is an Audition: Recent Books About Young Adult Performers (from Huffington Post Books)

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 York City High School of the Creative and Performing Arts (seemingly modeled off of Manhattan's Fame high school, the Fiorello H. La Guardia High School of Music and the Arts) as they strive, perform, and chart their futures. The book reads quickly and it will appeal to various young readers thanks to its range of characters, romantic storylines, and behind-the-scenes look at what is required of talented teens (though some may find the intermittent insertion of flashbacks and backstory confusing).

While we readers may feel exhilarated by the success and talent of the story's stars, it's clear that they are quite exhausted by their daily lives. Female songwriter, Emme, declares herself to be "tired of the auditions we have to do to be accepted each semester, tired of the extra classes and studios, tired of the concerts, the pressure, the competition. The constant competition." On top of regular auditions there are also pre-auditions for the most prestigious college music programs, like Julliard. These kids never get a break.

Television shows, like Glee, make it seem like musical numbers--complete with choreography and costumes--are simple to throw together. But teens spend hours honing their creative crafts whether they are singing and acting, like the characters in Take a Bow, or dancing and film-making, like the characters in Carol Tanzman's latest dancergirl.

CLICK HERE TO KEEP READING AT THE HUFFINGTON POST BOOKS!

dancergirl features high school student Alicia, a contemporary dancer who works at her dance studio to help afford extra dance and choreography classes. While she hopes to become a professional dancer, fame comes to her sooner than she expected when a classmate features her and her dancing in a series of short docu-style movies that he posts to online website Zube (a fictional version of YouTube). Suddenly strangers recognize Alicia and think they know her. And one person starts stalking her (though the careful reader will figure out who the stalker is before the big reveal it doesn't take away from the suspense of the story). The unwanted attention, including anonymous online comments, impacts Alicia's dancing, sense of self, and her physical safety.

Like Alicia many young girls today are constantly performing for others, even if they aren't dancers. Recently t(w)een girls have used YouTube to ask strangers if they are pretty or not. Technological innovations like YouTube and Facebook mean that kids today are constantly performing for others--and there will be a record of their achievements and failures, good deeds and misdeeds.

Clearly it's not just high school students who feel the pressure of the constant audition and performance of daily life. Children's literature reflects pressures for the elementary school-set as well. As an indication of how ubiquitous competitive activities are in young girls' lives, American Girl's "Girl of the Year" for 2012 is McKenna.

McKenna is a fourth-grader hoping to make the competitive gymnastics team. The first two books in the series, McKenna and McKenna, Ready to Fly!, detail her struggling to balance school, friends, and gymnastics as she deals with injuries and competition. The books reveal that one has to receive a letter to be invited to qualify for the "preteam," that certain elements are required in each routine to even be considered for that preteam, and that placing in the top two at a competition is what it takes to actually make the team.

Overall these four young adult/children's books reflect what is going on in many kids' lives today. The constant competition and evaluation--both by peers and by judging adults--are accepted by youth. While some parents fight against demanding, competitive activities and stressful schoolwork, (for example, documentaries like Race to Nowhere), others seem to accept that this is what is required if they want to help their children achieve and get into college. A whole afterschool industry exists around competitive performance activities like gymnastics and dance for kids that reinforces how important these activities are for parents.

While Take a Bow, dancergirl, and the McKenna books don't explicitly offer coping strategies for kids dealing with the constant auditions they must navigate, all the novels highlight the importance of friends in coping with competitive pressure. If one of the reasons why we read fiction is to see, and better understand, our own lives, these books will be welcome reads for children and teens struggling to get a callback every day.

High Kicks: The Latest in Competitive Dance and Soccer from Choreography Theft to Poaching to Year-round Commitments (and Injuries)

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 have the girls compete as burlesque dancers in Episode 9's "Topless Showgirls" is so obviously meant to shock it's painful.  The show, unsurprisingly, made headlines after that tasteless move (even I admit to being mortified when Abby yelled out, "Crotch! Boobs!" in rehearsal).

[Not surprisingly, and somewhat reassuringly, Lifetime is not allowing any rebroadcasts of this episode. Pushed the envelope TOO far (toward pedophilia), clearly. Love the following line from this March 23rd article about the episode being pulled: "Coincidentally, the yanked episode contains a subplot in which a child is transformed into a literal piece of meat."]

But once in the while the show does manage to say something interesting about the state of competitive dance.  Previously they touched on the issue of parents lying about their children's age and age fallbacks. Runaway mom Jill's departure in Episode 8 allowed Abby to discuss a serious issue in dance: choreography theft. Sometimes studios steal choreography from others that they see at competitions, which has long been an issue on the competitive circuit, as I discovered during my research.  But dance isn't just about creativity and artistry-- it is also a business, especially for studio owners like Abby. That choreography is her work product, so when Kendall uses it to "win" for someone else that is a form of intellectual property theft.  (I found this interesting article about what whether or not dance teachers employed by a studio owner own their own choreography after they leave. The issue is similar to one scientists face while working for a university or corporation. The short answer is that, no, they do not own it when they have been paid by someone else to create it.)

The reason why Kendall's defection affected Abby so much though is that it appeared as if Kathy "poached" her-- though this wasn't really what happened.  Another thing I discovered during my research is that poaching (when a coach or organization "steals" a student away from another coach or program) is common in lots of competitive children's activities. But I heard about it most often in travel soccer. In some areas the problem had previously been so bad that leagues had developed rules that once a season started a player was not allowed to switch and play for another team.  Most of the poaching took place in the spring/summer, as team compositions could shift more easily.

Now, with new rules that talented soccer players won't be allowed to play for both a development academy club team (which are at an even higher level than competitive, travel teams) and their high school's team, I expect this to become an even more weighty issue for players. With a year-round season that demands so much commitment it will be interesting to see how American soccer develops and performs over the next decade.  This move seems to be an attempt to unify training procedures-- though we still haven't yet reached true national training programs for young kids, in the grand tradition of many Communist countries.

But this move does signal a hat tip to the ways in which many European soccer ("football") clubs operate. Last week's Times article reminded me of an excellent piece Michael Sokolove wrote in 2010 for The New York Times Magazine: "How A Soccer Star is Made."  Sokolove identified some telling differences in the ways that Americans and Europeans develop child soccer players. He wrote, "Americans like to put together teams, even at the Pee Wee level, that are meant to win...Americans place a higher value on competition than on practice, so the balance between games and practice in the U.S. is skewed when compared with the rest of the world. It’s not unusual for a teenager in the U.S. to play 100 or more games in a season, for two or three different teams, leaving little time for training and little energy for it in the infrequent moments it occurs. A result is that the development of our best players is stunted."  We'll see if this shifts over time.

One likely negative outcome of this highly competitive year-round soccer season is an increase in injuries.  Youth sports injuries continue to garner a lot of attention and concern amongst both medical practitioners and parents. Check out this somewhat disturbing report sponsored by Little League Baseball now saying that they can't say for sure that throwing curveballs hurt young players.

So, what would you chose for your child? Curveballs, year-round seasons, or burlesque dance routines?

The Age of the Diva: Fallbacks in Dance and Pageants

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 [who made this deeply disturbing appearance on Anderson Cooper]) and because they bring to life to a broad audience many of the issues I think about in my research on competitive afterschool activities. I find the similar "scandals" that occur across a range of activities especially interesting, as I've written about before. One of them, age manipulation, has been the focus of several episodes in the most recent seasons of both shows. One mother mentioned in the fifth season premiere, the episode with Heaven and Honey Boo Boo, that it is harder for competitors when they have to "move up" in an age category (say from 3-4 to 5-6).  The fourth episode showed how some parents try to give their kids an advantage by using their "fallback" age when they have to move up in an age category.  Adriana's mom explained that while her daughter is five she would be competing as a four year-old because the pageant used a 30-day fallback. This means that because Adriana had her birthday within thirty days of the pageant she could compete as a four-year-old.  This also means that she might have been competing against someone who was 3 years and 31 days, while she was 5 years and 29 days-- a big difference at that age!

Fallbacks are also used in competitive dance, as the second episode of the new season of Dance Moms revealed. Brooke, one of the featured dancers, was able to compete in a younger age category due to her later birthday in January.  That was legal. But one of her other competitors, from a rival dance studio, actually competed under a false age-- which obviously led to her disqualification. This explains why dance teachers are always supposed to have copies of their dancers' birth certificates readily available, in case anyone questions a competitor's age (like the dance competition owners, as pictured below).

Even when complaints aren't formally filed, adults often gossip about the age of competitors.  And, lest you think this is behavior reserved for a group of women who I think are looking for media attention, take a look at this quote from a newly released book called Dance Divas, about a group of middle school-aged girls who participate in dance competitions: "The competition here is really fierce and you just never know.  I saw a girl out there that looked like she was twenty competing in your thirteen year old category. Who knows what's going on?"

In my research for Playing to Win many of the parents and teachers I met had learned to manipulate competitive activity systems in order to maximize the chance of winning-- even in chess.  This was harder to do with travel soccer, which was particularly strict when it came to verifying ages through birth certificates.  Soccer teams had to always have age verification handy and all ages were checked at the beginning of each season. I guess there are fewer divas in soccer. With a new show featuring figure skating moms, Ice Moms, in development (along with a Dance Moms spinoff set in Miami), I'm guessing we're going to see more diva behavior and not less on our television screens though...