This may be my last regular post for some time. I'm preparing for the arrival of my second son next month and want to enjoy the holidays, Carston's second birthday, and the end of this pregnancy (as much as that is possible!)-- especially before potential sibling rivalry/competition appears in my home!
In the competitive spirit I want to highlight a few recent writings I have done on competition, particularly as I wrap up my work related to this fall's release of PLAYING TO WIN.
1) The Wild, Unregulated Business of After-School Programs at The New Republic- I think this is one of the most important pieces I have ever done, and it is about an issue I feel VERY strongly about. Parents often don't know who is teaching their kids-- and at stake are injuries, psychological well-being, and significant investments of familial time and money. Please read and pass it on! Note there is more on this topic in Chapter 5 and the Conclusion of the book.
2) Is Competition for Kids Healthy-Yes! in Brain, Child- I'm the affirmative side of the debate (though I share much in common with the "negative" side, written by the super smart Sarah Buttenwieser). A good summary of what I took away from my research and how it applies to my parenting today.
3) Children and Competitiveness in Oxford Bibliography of Childhood Studies- While this is for students and a a more academic audience, it's a great resource for those of you interested in learning more about what's been done on kids and competition. It's always nice to be recognized as the expert in your field too...
I was also very gratified that Brain, Child's blog Brain, Mother ran such a nice review of Playing to Win (written by Lauren Apfel). I especially loved her description of the book: "Playing to Win is, at heart, a sociological study. It is a laying bare of a cultural phenomenon—its history and its infrastructure—not a judgment on that phenomenon. “Are these parents crazy?” Levey Friedman asks. “Have they lost their grip?” Her definitive answer to these questions is “no” and she walks the line between showing us why and telling us why with admirable grace. On the one hand, she lets the data and the people involved speak for themselves: interviews with both parents and children are a hallmark of the book. On the other hand, she is a careful, explicit and non-biased interpreter of her fieldwork."
As I get ready to explore for myself more issues of parental craziness, competition, and family dynamics, I will try to remain a non-biased observer of my own life and decisions. I'll keep you posted!
THIS POST ORIGINALLY APPEARED ON JEWISHBOSTON.COM. CLICK HERE TO READ IT THERE!
At my son Carston’s bris I proudly announced that he had already completed his first mitzvah—or at least I hoped he had.
Shortly after he came into this world, Carston gave up some blood—cord blood. He didn’t really have to do anything, but hopefully his donation will help save a life (and we know that to save one life is to save the entire world).
Any expectant mom who reads a baby magazine or signs up for a newborn-related email list has seen the ads for cord-blood banking. For parents with large personal fortunes, private cord-blood banking can seem like good protection against possible misfortune. Given some family’s medical history, private cord-blood banking might even be important. But for most of us, a better investment in our children’s futures is to take the thousands of dollars required for private cord-blood banking and open a college savings account instead.
My husband and I decided against privately banking our son’s cord blood, but I couldn’t stop thinking about cord blood.
For several years, my husband and I have been members of the National Marrow Donor Program. My husband has been matched not once, but twice, to someone in need of a bone-marrow transplant. It’s rare to be matched even once, so I joke that he has “super bone marrow” (though he’s never been called on to actually donate). I thought my son might have some of his dad’s super bone marrow and hoped he could perhaps help someone in need. So my husband and I decided to donate Carston’s cord blood to a public bank.
Because the hospital where I delivered did not collect cord blood, I reached out to the Carolinas Cord Blood Bank, one of four public cord-blood banks. They sent me a kit: a box that I brought with me to the hospital when I went into labor. A family member FedExed everything back to the blood bank the day Carston was born, and two days later we went home, minus the box, but with our bundle of joy.
We’ll never know if Carston’s cord blood helped someone, though of course I hope it has—or will someday. But to me, part of the importance of the act is in not knowing the specific impact. Hopefully my son’s cord-blood donation is but the first mitzvah in the life of a little mensch.
Is there anything worse than a Harvard stage mother? No, there is not.
When I was an undergraduate and saw all the babies going to do experiments in William James Hall, I vowed that someday my kids would do the same. But in the haze of postpartum life I forgot my promise to myself. Until a letter arrived from Harvard's Baby Lab when Little Man was around 6 months. I immediately signed him up and he did his first experiment within weeks.
The next month I got a letter from Boston College's Infant & Child Cognition Laboratory so I also signed him up for experiments there. He loved their lab, where he found one of his all-time favorite toys (an activity table), and started a collection of Infant Scientist certificates (he's now received a post-doc in infant science and he's an Advanced Scholar, natch).
That got the social scientist and writer in my thinking about other experimental opportunities in Boston. I quickly discovered that I could sign Carston up for experiments at other area institutions, like Boston Children's Hospital and University of Massachusetts-Boston. We'd officially joined what I dubbed the "Boston baby experiment circuit" and I had the motivation for my next article.
That article is in this month's Boston Magazine. It's even featured on the cover!
Click HERE to read the web version of the article or HERE to see the published version in the Magazine.
I mentioned the article to my friends at NECN's The Morning Show, where I am a regular guest, and they decided to follow Carston as he did an experiment at Boston College's Lab.
Carston *loved* being on camera, as you can see:
He also loved anchor Bridget Blythe, of course.
Here's his big TV debut!
(You can also link to the clip and story by clicking HERE.)
Also, I swear that the sensor cap doesn't bother Carston at all. They used an unsmiling (but nonetheless cute, of course) pic of my guy for the story, but here is one of my all-time favorite images of him smiling in an experiment:
He's even happy when he has "octopus kisses" after getting his cap off!
I have apparently raised a rather vain Little Man though; he was completely obsessed and mystified by seeing himself on TV this morning.
He even checked out the picture of himself watching himself (this is getting very meta and says a lot about screens in our society, I'm sure):
Carston, the Infant Scientist, thinks it would be an interesting experiment to see what kids his age think about seeing moving images of themselves...
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 push their kids to become pint-sized phenoms at younger and younger ages. With the development of the Internet and many more organized competitions in a variety of fields it's become easier to develop skill and talent in a variety of fields and activities.
Running is one such area. Unlike baseball and football, which require specialized skills (although, as I wrote about last month, even football is seeing young stars in areas like quarterback), kids learn to start running shortly after they learn to walk. Three female running prodigies have recently made headlines.
1) Mary Cain-While she might not seem like a true prodigy given that she is 16, Cain is a prodigy when it comes to (middle- and long-distance) running-- a sport where women often do not peak until their 20s and even 30s. Cain is setting records (she set the American high school record in the 1500m at the World Junior Championships) and she is already so good that she caught the eye of legendary running coach Alberto Salazar, who is coaching her long-distance (pun intended). Cain is so good that she stopped running for her high school team and is now running as an independent-- though she is careful to preserve her NCAA eligibility.
2) Katylynn and Heather Welsch- The Welsch sisters likely aspire to be a runner like Cain someday. Today the girls inspire strong feelings-- sometimes admiration and awe, but more often concern and consternation. At only 12 and 10 they often compete in 13-mile trail runs and even in marathons. Their father coaches them in running and biking and pushes them to run faster than some men. The long NYT feature on them raised some question marks as it describes tears, injuries, and a high-level of parental involvement. While it's true that it's difficult to say what is best for a child, and I wouldn't presume to do so, I will hazard a guess that 4-6 years from now these girls won't be competing the way Cain does. Burnout and/or the puberty monster (hopefully they will hit puberty at a normal rate) will likely strike. Extreme, young athletes like the Welsch girls raise questions about how young is too young for little bodies.
We also made sure to get a training "run" in beforehand to see if he could actually do the full distance. While slightly tongue-in-cheek, you can definitely get a sense of the fun chaos in our house-- and our different parenting styles-- from this video.
So how did the actual race go? Before the race started Carston was very interested in the race official, as you can see.
You may have noticed that according to his bib he was number 1. No, he wasn't the first one to sign up-- every child is given the number 1. Even among the youngest kids I find this (as someone who studies kids and competition) slightly ridiculous. In a race it is very clear-- even to a three-year-old-- who finished first, second, third, etc. In other competitions like chess and dance it's less obvious so I can understand other choices, but not so in running.
In any case, we held the Little Man back until the final heat in the 4 and under set (there were four, from what I could tell). He obviously got off to a pretty slow start. Here he is on the race course.
After getting a lift to the finish line (distracted by the cold and crowd he lost focus, unlike in his training video), he ended strong-- but only barely before the 5-6 age division started.
At the finish line every child got a medal. As I discovered while research Playing to Win, younger kids are quite taken with participation awards. But once they hit first grade or so they become much savvier. For this reason I'm sure that the 8-12 year-olds in particular would have much preferred an actual trophy if they won. In any case, I'm sure that someday Carston will appreciate his first medal that is just about his current length! In the interest of full disclosure, which gives you some real insight into how I feel about this medal, when his relatives said, "Oh, look what you won!" I replied, "Well, he didn't really win it, but I guess he earned it."
After the Kids' K, I bundled the Little Man up so John could push him in the five-mile race. John was actually the first person to finish the race while pushing a running stroller, so there's hope for Carston's competitive juices yet-- if only he'd been awake to see the big finish. By mile 2 Carston was out cold and he slept right on through the finish line and the walk back to our car.
Running is a great activity for kids. It burns off energy and can promote overall health. But like most things, when taken to an extreme it can be a negative experience. I don't envision Carstonr unning endurance races at age 10, but it'd be great if he was setting records at 16...
In any case I'm guessing even next year at 22 months he won't be very competitive at the Feaster Five. But I'm sure he'll enter, if only to get another shirt like this one.
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 the midst of everything else! Being a SAHM for a few weeks meant my child got to eat Chicken McNuggets for the first time (which he obviously loved; he also napped better than ever after eating them, so McDonald's clearly knows what they are doing). I attempted to not feel guilty about this, and other things during this time, with varying degrees of success.
Having written about parenting for years, parenting my own child has certainly added a new dimension to my work, as I knew it would. And just this week I published my first ever parenting essay over on Kveller's Raising Kvell blog. You'll see that it's about whether or not Little Man should be thinking about competition at 8-months-old. [You will also note that I am not the woman pictured swimming. As I say to the husband each week, "Someone would have to pay me a lot of money these days to get me into a bathing suit." Of course, if you're that person, feel free to call or email me.]
Parenting a competitive child does not come cheap, as this recent CNBC.com slideshow that features my research reveals, but many parents consider it worth the effort. Parents are also starting to "afterschool" their kids, as this new, interesting article reveals; note that I'm quoted here as saying, "They want to make sure their kids stay at the top of their class," but in general parents just want to try to be sure their kids "stay at the top."
Because I was home with him I got to take the Little Man to see democracy in action for the first time. But he wouldn't tell which beauty queen politician he would have voted for... Guess I'll have to wait until he can talk to find out!
