Product Description
Synopsis
Presents true-life stories that bear witness to the power of sports to raise girls' self-esteem.
From the Author
Sports can help girls grow up to be strong women.
We aren’t ourselves serious athletes. Jean was part of the pre-Title IX generation, when opportunities for girls in sports were limited. Gil grew up during the 60s, when, basically, all bets were off. He wrestled some and played football in junior high, but by high school he was out of sports entirely. So we didn’t approach our subject as jocks. We did approach it as the parents of a 6-year-old daughter. Like a lot of new parents we made an informal survey of the cultural landscape to see what kind of world we had brought our daughter into. This was, of course, after she was born, when it was too late to turn back. Some of what we encountered disturbed us. While we had every confidence in the resilience, determination and eventual success of our daughter, it was clear that all was not right with the way girls respond to modern culture -- something wrong with the culture, that is, not with the girls. We were losing them. As they crossed the threshold to adulthood many of them go into a sort of retreat. Where before they had been brash, confident, sassy, they now might be sullen, forlorn, withdrawn. Of course, some of this is the natural response of a 13-year-old realizing the daunting task of growing up. But some of it was produced by a society that one expert labeled "girl-poisoning." Carol Gilligan, one of the leading theoreticians of adolescence, calls the essential part of girls’ identity "voice," and she documents ways in which girls’ voices are lost, diminished, misplaced amidst the storms of growing up. Additionally, research has indicated that girls may get shortchanged in the classroom, and that they are bombarded with media images that allow females only decorative or subservient roles in life. Like a lot of people we read and were alarmed by Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia. Here was a clinical psychologist drawing portrait after portrait of wounded girls, coming to her with overwhelming personal problems. Granted, Pipher specialized in girls in trouble. But for us, her book was a disturbing portrayal of dark possibilities lurking in our daughter’s future. At the end of Reviving Ophelia, Pipher asks what we as a society can do about this problem. Although she has specific suggestions, her overall recomendation boils down to: reform the culture. And that’s fine. We’re ready to put our shoulders to the wheel to do that as best we can. But it’s a tall order. As parents, we needed something more concrete, more immediate, something we could do in the day to day to inoculate our daughter against the contagion of helplessness that seemed to be sweeping the land. To find the answer, one thing we did was just follow our daughter’s lead. She’s an active, physical little girl, and so she indicated a possible direction for us to look. Many other people, writers and experts, indicated the same direction. What we discovered was that across the board, girls who are involved in athletics negotiate the hazards of adolescence better, on the average, than girls who remain uninvolved. Girls who play sports are less likely to drop out of school, more likely to go on to college and more likely to graduate college. They tend to get higher scores on their college entrance exams. They are less likely to engage in a whole panoply of self-destructive behaviors. They are less likely to get pregnant, less likely to smoke tobacco, less likely to abuse drugs, less likely to attempt suicide. They have a better body image. While research on the relationship between athletics and self-esteem is just beginning, clearly, there is abundant evidence to tell us that girls who play sports are better equipped to make the difficult passage to adulthood. For our book we talked to young female athletes, their coaches and parents, as well as many other experts in the field. We traveled all over the country, talking to girls in many different cultural environments. Our book is for parents, grandparents, educators, coaches, counselors, social workers, child psychiatrists -- anyone concerned with the health of our children. Most of all, it is for the girls themselves. The young female athletes we spoke with were some of the most amazing people we have ever met. We hope that in reading our book, you’ll think so too.
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