When it comes to youth sports, it turns out that two of us were accomplished young athletes and two of us were clever shirkers of organized sports. Listen to find out who skied and skated and swam and who conscientiously defended the part of the soccer field with nobody in it, then share your own sporty exploits on our Facebook page.
The Insufficient Ice Incident of September 2015 prompted Catherine to take a closer look at sports superstitions. So in this week’s Round 4, she and Charlie Zegers discussed the difference between superstitions and rituals and how they work, both in the major leagues and in youth sports. Charlie writes about sports and also about parenting kids on the autism spectrum. He is also proud to say that he's able to watch major sporting events from any seat in his living room without fear. (If you’re reading this somewhere without hyperlinks, visit http://parentingroundabout.com for the full recap experience.)
The US women's soccer victory in the World Cup got us thinking about sports and women's sports and whether our daughters will be inspired by this sort of thing ... and then realizing that out of the four of us, two of us had nothing to say about sports and one had fled the country. So we sent Catherine as our ambassador into Sportsland to chat with our Round 4 contributor and resident sports guy Charlie Zegers about whether this means people are finally going to start caring about soccer and women's sports.
She returned to join Amanda and Terri in a little ranting in the style of Amy Poelher and Seth Meyers' "Really?" rant about the dissing of women's sports. Terri wondered why, really, online job applications for minimum-wage gigs require endless pages of psychological questions; Catherine asked her kids if really, they have to be in her face all summer long; and Amanda marveled that, really, special-education departments can just close over the summer and leave new students with IEPs to scramble at the last minute?
With all that out of our system, we made our recommendations for the week: Catherine has an article on "How (and Why) You Can Support Women's Sports"; Amanda liked an article by Katherine Lewis on "What If Everything You Knew About Disciplining Kids Was Wrong?" (really?); and Terri shared some links to stories about sports programs for kids with special needs and ways to adapt sports for inclusion and start an inclusive sports program.
Thanks as always to Jon Morin for producing our episode and Kristen Eredics for our happy in-and-out music. If you're reading this somewhere without hyperlinks, go to http://parentingroundabout.com for the full recap experience.