Tag Archives: family
I’ve just started reading Michael Oher’s new book,
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I walked into the spelling bee just as my daughter was at the microphone for her first word of the day. She saw me coming in, and for a moment I panicked, thinking that I would distract her and she’d miss an easy one.
Fortunately, the word was “exclusive,” and I suspect Meredith could spell the word before she could pronounce it. As a seventh grader, it was no challenge whatsoever.
That’s the way it is in our family. Kimberly and I are journalists, and we’re all avid readers. Spelling comes as naturally to us as breathing. I wasn’t surprised to learn that spelling and reading proficiency have a very strong genetic component:
According to John Stein, Professor of Neuroscience at Oxford University Medical School, both reading and spelling require a phenomenal amount of brain power. Deciphering…
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“The way we normally handle this,” the ski-patrol guy explained to me on the phone Thursday night, “is we put your daughter on a backboard, call an ambulance, and send her to the emergency room.”
“Or,” I suggested, “you could give her an ibuprofen for her headache, and maybe suggest she work on her skiing technique.”
We compromised: no ibuprofen, and no emergency room.
Meredith was fine, of course, despite taking a hard fall in her second outing of the season with her middle school’s ski club. It was only her fourth time on skis in her young life, but she’d insisted she didn’t need lessons, and in fact had expressed nothing but overconfidence in her skills leading up to her tumble.
If I were a great parent like Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, I’d…
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The term “alpha male” is one of those designations we hang on people without much thought of its origins or its true implications.
It’s kind of like describing someone as a “Type A personality” or saying a particular behavior is “passive-aggressive.” What we really mean, in the case of the guy labeled Type A, is that he works hard and gets a lot done. If we say someone’s passive-aggressive, as often as not we’re slapping a pathology on someone who just doesn’t care enough to give us whatever we need at the moment we need it.
But calling someone an alpha male is both more specific and, in most cases, more respectful. It implies that the guy has fought his way to the top of whatever group he leads. Moreover, it suggests he could fight his way to the top of any organization he chooses, and breed…
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I’ve spent big parts of my life alternately making bad decisions, and then recovering from the damage caused by those bad decisions, which is why I enjoyed reading this brief interview in today’s New York Times Magazine.
The upshot: Our brains make decisions in the prefrontal cortex, which is bigger in humans than in other animals. It’s also the last part of the brain to develop, which is why we don’t want children making important decisions, for themselves or for others.
If you read my post last week about the Christmas-tree fiasco, you know how it worked out the last time I ignored my adult brain and listened to someone with an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex. That decision was actually worse than I described, thanks to a few minor and entirely self-inflicted calamities.
In the comments, I left the subject on an upbeat note: We’d gotten…
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When we lived in Los Angeles, my wife and I put up an artificial tree each year. But each year, like a bad houseguest, the tree gathered more dust, shed more needles, and sucked more joy out of the air. That’s why, when we moved here to Pennsylvania, we left the disassembled fake tree in the basement and went with a real live Christmas tree each December. (And, of course, by “live” I mean a tree we killed.)
Until this year. We woke up Saturday morning, went through the usual panic of getting kids to karate and Girl Scouts and who knows what else — I really only pay attention if I have to drive the kid there myself — and realized, halfway through the day, that we needed to get a Christmas tree. Now. Every other weekend day is booked solid for the rest of…
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Let me say up front that I’ve never coached a team at any level before, and don’t pretend to have any particular skills or knowledge in that area. All I know is that my daughter’s recreational league needed someone to coach, I volunteered, and managed to get the team through the season almost undefeated.
In fact, we were undefeated until yesterday. But nobody expected our team to win that last game, so in that sense I still consider the season a remarkable success.
Readers of my original Male Pattern Fitness blog may remember this entry, about one of my daughter’s soccer games two years ago.
Here’s a quick recap of the part that’s relevant to this post:
My daughter [Meredith] is probably the youngest player in the league (her birthday was just on the wrong side of the cutoff), which means the median player is a year…
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Lou Schuler is an award-winning fitness journalist and author of many popular books about strength training and nutrition. For the full story, click here.
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