Raising Our Athletic Daughters - How Sports Can Build Self-Esteem And Save Girls' Lives

Zusatztext "provides immediate! accessible! and invaluable information to help daughters everywhere succeed on and off the field."-- Palo Alto Daily News Informationen zum Autor Jean Zimmerman collaborated with Felice Schwartz on Breaking with Tradition: Women and Work, the New Facts of Life and was the author of Tailspin: Women at War in the Wake of Tailhook.   Her husband,  Gil Reavill, is a freelance journalist.  They live in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, with their daughter. Klappentext Now in paperback! the first book to document how participating in sports changes young girls' lives during the difficult years of adolescence. From high-profile women's professional leagues to high-school-level champions! girl athletes are acheiving record breakthroughs. Witness! for example! the first spectacular season of the WNBA! or the celebrated victories of women's teams at the 1996 Olympics. The female athlete is a new media darling especially beloved of today's teenage girls! who are almost as likely to have pictures of Rebecca Lobo! Mia Hamm! or Gabrielle Reece on their walls as posters of Leonardo DiCaprio. So it seems paradoxical that many books and studies attest to a truly sobering picture of girls' lives. With her book Reviving Ophelia ! Mary Pipher was only the latest in a string of theorists to describe the dramatic ways in which girls loose self-esteem during the critical years of adolescence! contributing to eating disorders! drug problems! and chronic depression in many young women. In Raising Our Athletic Daughters ! journalists Zimmerman and Reavill set out to talk with girls and their parents about how sports can transform girls' lives. Here are firsthand stories from the inner cities and rural playing fields across the nation! offering compelling evidence that participation in athletics makes an extraordinary difference in the lives of young girls! from reducing pregnancy rates and substance abuse to increasing college attendance. Raising Our Athletic Daughters is a clarion call for all those eager to help their children succeed and level the playing field! at last. As parents, as educators, as a society we are searching for answers in the late 1990s, when the cultural environment we provide for our children, and especially for our daughters, seems increasingly threatening and malignant. We've been troubled by a picture painted of adolescent girls today which indicates that our daughters lose something of themselves as they cross the threshold to adulthood, an essential part of the self that a leading theorist of female adolescence, Carol Gilligan, has labeled "voice." A wake-up call for many parents came with the widespread dissemination of a survey report by the American Association of University Women (AAUW) in 1992. "Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America" is only one of a series of studies that have painted a dark picture of the way our society treats its daughters. The survey found a troubling downward arc to related aspects of girls' lives as they continue through secondary school. They experience a larger drop in self-esteem than do boys, and as a result are "more likely to lose interest in activities that challenge them, less likely to believe in their own abilities, and less likely to question teachers even when they believe the teachers are wrong." Other research has reinforced the findings of the AAUW report. Most recently, the Commonwealth Fund's Survey of the Health of Adolescent Girls, conducted in 1996-97 by Louis Harris and associates, recorded the responses of 6,748 boys and girls in grades five through twelve. Two of the survey's key findings were that girls are at a significantly higher risk than boys for suffering depressive symptoms and that girls lose their self-confidence as they mature, in contrast to boys, who gain in self-confidence as they grow older. Clearly, there is...

Product details

• Authors: Gil Reavill, Jean Zimmerman
• Publisher: Main Street Books
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 19.10.1999
• EAN: 9780385489607
• ISBN: 978-0-385-48960-7
• No. of pages: 272
• Dimensions: 140 mm x 216 mm x 13 mm
• Subjects: Guides > Sport; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Sociological theories