Raising Our Athletic Daughters: How Sports Can Build Self-esteem (Hardcover)

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 Where before they had been brash, confident, sassy, they now might be sullen, forlorn, withdrawn.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 alarm