2024-08-20_Healthy_Development_for_Girls_and_Young_Women
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00:00:26.560 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,
00:00:33.040 | skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while
00:00:37.160 | building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.
00:00:40.200 | My name is Joshua Sheets.
00:00:41.200 | I'm your host.
00:00:42.200 | On a recent podcast, I talked to you about how to maximize your height so that you have
00:00:47.520 | the best possibility of gaining all the benefits that come from being tall.
00:00:53.000 | The specific connection to personal finance is that we have some academic estimates and
00:00:58.320 | scholarly discussions that estimate that for about every inch of height that you have over
00:01:03.480 | the normal person, you can increase your earning power by perhaps more than 2%.
00:01:09.880 | The numbers vary a little bit, but 2% is a conservative estimate.
00:01:13.320 | I've seen as high as 2.8%, so I just call it 2% to be safe.
00:01:17.600 | Now, most of that discussion, though, is centered on men because the differences for income
00:01:25.080 | related to height are primarily or most marked with regard to men.
00:01:30.920 | They're not so clear in the data with regard to women, and that would make sense to us,
00:01:36.040 | I think, generally.
00:01:37.040 | It would make sense that men and women are treated differently, and there's a different
00:01:40.840 | set of traits and characteristics that women are judged by versus the ones that men are
00:01:45.680 | judged by.
00:01:47.120 | But just because I focused on that in that podcast episode doesn't mean that any of the
00:01:51.120 | advice that I gave was necessarily inapplicable to women.
00:01:55.360 | After all, our daughters, especially during their puberty years and teenage years, our
00:02:01.040 | daughters need to have ample amounts of food.
00:02:04.280 | Our daughters need to have ample amounts of sleep.
00:02:07.000 | Our daughters need to have ample amounts of physical exercise.
00:02:10.800 | But the question is, is there something that is different about trying to transmit these
00:02:16.160 | characteristics to men versus to women?
00:02:19.280 | And I think there obviously are.
00:02:20.640 | After all, if I play fast and loose with the things that we don't have data for, for example,
00:02:26.280 | we understand that people who are good looking probably get kind of a beauty premium.
00:02:31.440 | A man who's very handsome or a woman who's very beautiful has an easier time in some
00:02:35.920 | things in the world.
00:02:37.360 | Somebody who's in great shape.
00:02:38.360 | We could go on and on with this logic forever.
00:02:40.840 | But what I want to do in today's podcast is I want to share with you some information
00:02:44.240 | that I learned from a book called Girls on the Edge by Dr. Leonard Sachs, specifically
00:02:51.000 | about the things that we should be treating differently in the physical development of
00:02:56.600 | women and our daughters as compared to the physical development of men.
00:03:01.720 | Because a lot of things related to the body, the development of the body, the development
00:03:06.640 | of athletic ability, a lot of our focus historically comes from men, from helping to develop young
00:03:13.120 | men.
00:03:14.120 | And a lot of the things that we do to develop young men can be very damaging to women.
00:03:18.120 | Now, this, the outline of what I'm going to share with you comes from chapter six of Girls
00:03:22.960 | on the Edge.
00:03:24.240 | Chapter six is entitled Body.
00:03:26.360 | And it's not the most important thing.
00:03:28.720 | His first chapter was he talked about the sexual identity of girls.
00:03:31.920 | Chapter two, he talked about social media.
00:03:34.140 | Chapter three, dreams and obsessions.
00:03:36.000 | Chapter four, environmental toxins.
00:03:37.760 | Chapter five, mind.
00:03:39.240 | This chapter, body.
00:03:40.280 | And then the next chapter, spirit.
00:03:41.640 | It's a good book that I recommend, and I've shared with you some resources from this book
00:03:46.400 | previously.
00:03:47.600 | But specifically with regard to helping our daughters to develop their bodies, we need
00:03:51.840 | to understand that the way that we treat girls in their physical development needs to be
00:03:57.920 | different than the way that we treat boys.
00:04:01.220 | That doesn't make it any less important.
00:04:03.520 | We want our daughters to be strong and confident.
00:04:06.420 | And a huge component of that personal strength and confidence comes from their physical development.
00:04:12.400 | But we need to understand that it's a little bit different.
00:04:14.600 | So I'm just going to jump into this.
00:04:16.360 | Consider this to be a personal finance light episode.
00:04:18.880 | If you're interested in these topics related to human development, you'll enjoy this episode.
00:04:22.760 | If you're looking for nuts and bolts on personal finance, this isn't your cup of tea.
00:04:26.400 | I will, one final note before I get into the text is simply that this chapter is, as is
00:04:32.320 | this entire book, heavily footnoted, I counted 76 footnotes for all the statements that Dr.
00:04:38.640 | Sachs makes in this particular chapter.
00:04:41.760 | I'm not going to try to cite everything because that's annoying.
00:04:44.880 | But just know that if you're interested, check out this book, Girls on the Edge.
00:04:49.900 | If you intended for a girl to suffer a major injury, you would take away all her other
00:04:54.600 | sports before puberty, make her play her one sport all year round, and then you would just
00:05:00.680 | wait.
00:05:02.220 | Michael Sokolov.
00:05:04.280 | Which is better, hopscotch or baseball?
00:05:08.000 | Jump rope or soccer?
00:05:10.440 | Better for whom?
00:05:11.880 | Better for what?
00:05:13.840 | Physical education for elementary school kids in North America usually includes instruction
00:05:18.040 | in baseball, learning how to swing a bat to hit the ball, run the bases, and so forth.
00:05:23.600 | It's much less common for kids to receive formal instruction in hopscotch.
00:05:28.380 | We encourage kids to play competitive soccer far more often than we encourage them to play
00:05:32.720 | competitive jump rope.
00:05:34.720 | How come?
00:05:35.720 | 8-year-old boys are, on average, better than girls at tasks that require targeting a moving
00:05:41.160 | object in space, which means boys are likely to have an edge in games that involve swinging
00:05:45.780 | a bat to hit a pitched ball or kicking a moving soccer ball into a goal.
00:05:50.480 | 8-year-old girls are, on average, better than boys at tasks that require balance, which
00:05:56.080 | means girls will have the edge in games such as hopscotch or jump rope.
00:06:00.720 | Our physical education programs for children usually promote sports where boys have the
00:06:05.400 | advantage while de-emphasizing or ignoring sports where girls have the advantage.
00:06:11.560 | When surveyed, girls typically think boys are better athletes than girls.
00:06:16.240 | One reason may be that our physical education programs emphasize sports such as baseball,
00:06:21.480 | football, and soccer in which boys enjoy advantages while devaluing or ignoring activities where
00:06:27.440 | girls enjoy the advantage, such as the balance beam, hopscotch, or jump rope.
00:06:33.880 | Ignoring gender puts girls at a disadvantage.
00:06:36.760 | In the gym, as in the classroom, we teach girls pretty much the same way we teach boys
00:06:42.120 | simply because there hasn't been much serious consideration that maybe what works best for
00:06:46.880 | boys might not always work best for girls.
00:06:50.660 | I still encounter suspicion when I suggest that girls should be taught differently, either
00:06:55.440 | in the classroom or on the playing field.
00:06:58.600 | Whenever I make such a suggestion, I often get the response, "Are you suggesting that
00:07:02.280 | girls can't do what the boys can do?"
00:07:05.000 | But ignoring differences between girls and boys doesn't provide a level playing field.
00:07:11.200 | As we will see, it often puts girls at a disadvantage and at risk.
00:07:17.840 | A second reason that so many girls believe that boys are better athletes is probably
00:07:22.000 | because the boys tell them so, beginning in elementary school.
00:07:25.960 | Many boys boast about their athletic prowess.
00:07:28.920 | As one team of investigators reported, girls are more realistic about their competencies
00:07:33.360 | while boys overestimate their physical competence, especially in the early years.
00:07:38.880 | Most adult women, and many teenage girls, have figured out that boys often exaggerate
00:07:44.160 | their athletic skills, but most eight-year-old girls haven't yet discovered that boys are
00:07:49.240 | not trustworthy regarding their self-assessment of their own athletic ability.
00:07:53.280 | Now, I'm going to make comments as I read this, and I think one of the reasons I want
00:07:57.560 | to share this information with you is that I believe it's our responsibility to cultivate
00:08:03.060 | environments in which boys can thrive and in which girls can thrive.
00:08:09.440 | We can't, maybe it's out there, maybe I just haven't found the research yet.
00:08:12.480 | We can't, so I'll make my statement, but I don't know of how we can estimate specifically
00:08:18.520 | the impact of personal self-confidence on income, on the amount of income that is earned.
00:08:25.360 | If those studies have been done, I haven't stumbled into them yet, but I haven't gone
00:08:28.520 | looking.
00:08:29.520 | There was a lot years ago in the self-esteem world and self-confidence and all of that.
00:08:34.360 | My basic way of summarizing what I understand about that area of research is that self-confidence
00:08:42.620 | is real, self-esteem is real, but it has to be earned.
00:08:46.040 | It has to be earned by genuine accomplishment.
00:08:48.520 | Kind of fake confidence or just pretending that you have it is of only limited value.
00:08:53.200 | It has to actually be earned.
00:08:54.840 | So if we want our children and ourselves to succeed, we need to create environments in
00:08:59.800 | which we can genuinely succeed, and what's interesting is it doesn't have to be any one
00:09:04.000 | particular thing.
00:09:05.080 | So what we need to do is we need to create environments in which our boys and our girls
00:09:09.200 | can work hard and develop skills that allow them to truly shine.
00:09:15.560 | The problem is that in today's androgynous world where we're all bent and determined
00:09:19.880 | to never ever indicate that there may be any difference between boys and girls, because
00:09:23.760 | to indicate so would be a complete failure of all of our modern gender experiment, we
00:09:29.280 | wind up handicapping boys and girls.
00:09:32.680 | And I've found that basically in every area this is difficult.
00:09:37.880 | We'll talk more in this chapter about the value of boys-only education or boys-only
00:09:43.600 | classes and girls-only education, girls-only classes, and you'll see some of the research
00:09:47.320 | that we know on this.
00:09:48.880 | But bring it up.
00:09:50.000 | We brought it up.
00:09:51.000 | My wife has brought it up in kind of our homeschool co-op, which is a conservative homeschool
00:09:55.440 | co-op filled with Christians, it's a Christian homeschool co-op, and yet nobody is willing
00:10:00.520 | to even consider the idea that boys and girls learn differently.
00:10:05.040 | Nobody is willing to even consider the fact that, hey, let's try out some things that
00:10:08.600 | are gender-divided because somehow that would be bad for the girls.
00:10:13.440 | What's the point of physical education?
00:10:15.280 | Why bother?
00:10:16.440 | Is it about the joy of sports?
00:10:18.560 | But the sports that bring joy to a child may be different for girls compared with boys.
00:10:23.080 | And the best way to engage girls in sport is often different from the best way to engage
00:10:27.200 | boys.
00:10:28.840 | Men may be less likely to understand how to engage girls in sport than women are.
00:10:34.000 | If that's true, it would be helpful to have women coaching girls.
00:10:37.520 | But the majority of coaches for most team sports are men.
00:10:41.160 | In fact, the proportion of coaches who are women has actually declined significantly
00:10:45.480 | over the years.
00:10:46.920 | In 1972, 90% of coaches of women's teams at American colleges and universities were
00:10:53.080 | women.
00:10:54.080 | In 2006, the proportion of women coaches among coaches of women's sports had dropped to
00:10:59.040 | 42%.
00:11:00.040 | The latest survey shows that proportion to have dropped further, slightly, to 41%.
00:11:06.040 | So, we went from 90% to 41 or 42%, cutting more than half.
00:11:11.960 | We have more girls and young women playing sports today, but proportionately fewer women
00:11:16.480 | coaching them.
00:11:18.000 | That's true at every level, from beginner leagues for seven-year-olds right up through
00:11:22.240 | college.
00:11:23.240 | As Michael Sokolov writes in his book about girls in sport, "The unspoken feeling in
00:11:27.960 | many settings is that men know sports.
00:11:31.120 | They've been at it longer.
00:11:32.120 | So, if you want your daughter's travel team to succeed and the girls to get scholarships,
00:11:36.120 | you'd better have a male coach."
00:11:38.700 | Among parents who have kids playing competitive sports, more than 27% of fathers coach their
00:11:43.760 | child's sport team.
00:11:45.620 | Less than 4% of the mothers are coaches.
00:11:48.760 | That imbalance leads to a third reason why so many girls assume that sports are, fundamentally,
00:11:54.760 | male territory.
00:11:56.160 | The experts, the coaches, are overwhelmingly male.
00:12:00.160 | The fact that so many girls think that males are better at sports may also explain why
00:12:04.360 | most girls attach more weight to their father's opinion about their own athletic ability than
00:12:09.280 | they do to their mother's opinion.
00:12:11.600 | Gym teachers matter.
00:12:13.600 | Coaches matter.
00:12:14.600 | The style of the coach or the P.E. teacher may have a big influence on how your daughter
00:12:18.200 | views sports and her own ability to play.
00:12:21.600 | Some coaches have a relentless focus on playing to win.
00:12:25.440 | That's not helpful for most kids, both girls and boys, but it's particularly harmful for
00:12:30.440 | many girls.
00:12:32.120 | The research consistently shows that girls are more likely to be engaged in sports when
00:12:36.400 | coaches focus on helping kids master skills, praising good performance, and offering encouragement
00:12:42.400 | and supportive criticism when girls make mistakes.
00:12:46.000 | Coaches or gym teachers who make fun of the klutzy kids or coaches who ignore kids who
00:12:50.200 | aren't athletically talented will not make good coaches for most girls.
00:12:55.400 | We also know that coaches who play favorites can turn girls off a sport very quickly.
00:13:00.560 | If girls believe that the coach has favorites, then the unfavored girls may quit.
00:13:05.880 | Girls should be active and as athletic as they can be, within healthy limits.
00:13:12.360 | We discuss some of the limits in Warning Science in Chapter 3.
00:13:15.520 | As a parent, you can help your daughter choose the sports and physical activities she most
00:13:19.400 | enjoys, and where she can fulfill her athletic potential with the greatest benefits and lowest
00:13:24.320 | risks.
00:13:25.840 | All sports carry some degree of risk, of course.
00:13:28.780 | You must understand the risks and balance them against the benefit.
00:13:32.200 | In helping your daughter choose a sport, the first question you need to answer is this,
00:13:37.480 | which are the most dangerous sports?
00:13:41.080 | I think you're going to enjoy this section, it's pretty astonishing.
00:13:44.640 | Ashley Marie Burns was just a few weeks away from starting 9th grade.
00:13:48.800 | She was one of 12 incoming freshman girls chosen for the cheerleading team at Medford
00:13:53.600 | High School in Massachusetts.
00:13:55.800 | She and three other girls were rehearsing a stunt called an arabesque double down.
00:14:00.780 | The three other girls were to throw Ashley in the air and then catch her.
00:14:04.800 | Ashley had previously executed the stunt without a problem.
00:14:07.920 | Indeed, she was renowned as one of the best flyers on the squad.
00:14:12.280 | At 4.51 p.m., the girls tried the stunt.
00:14:15.960 | Ashley came down wrong, landing in the other girls' arms with her chest down instead
00:14:20.540 | of on her back.
00:14:22.100 | She didn't appear to be injured, nothing was broken or dislocated, but she complained
00:14:26.460 | of feeling short of breath.
00:14:28.400 | The coach told her to stretch her hands over her head and then send her to the bathroom
00:14:32.560 | to splash cold water on her face.
00:14:35.420 | Ashley still didn't feel right, but nobody called 911 until she passed out half an hour
00:14:39.520 | later.
00:14:40.960 | She never regained consciousness.
00:14:43.240 | She was pronounced dead at the hospital at 6 o'clock p.m.
00:15:12.400 | An autopsy revealed that she had lacerated her spleen when she fell.
00:15:18.200 | She died of massive internal bleeding.
00:15:20.920 | Unfortunately, Ashley's story is not unique, nor was her injury an incredibly rare accident.
00:15:27.400 | Girls' cheerleading is by some measures the most dangerous sport kids do today.
00:15:33.800 | More dangerous even than football or ice hockey if the measure of danger is the number of
00:15:38.480 | serious injuries per thousand athletes.
00:15:41.440 | The National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research (NCCSI) publishes an annual
00:15:46.600 | report chronicling deaths and serious injuries sustained by high school and college athletes.
00:15:53.080 | Over 25 years, the NCCSI documented a total of 156 serious injuries or deaths among high
00:16:00.220 | school girls and college women.
00:16:02.800 | Of those, 97 occurred in cheerleading.
00:16:06.880 | That's more than in all other girls' sports combined.
00:16:11.640 | Dr. Robert Cantu, a professor of neurosurgery at Boston University School of Medicine and
00:16:17.040 | a co-author of the NCCSI report says, "What's staggering, really, is that the single most
00:16:22.680 | dangerous activity in sports in schools is to be a flyer in cheerleading," he says.
00:16:28.000 | The chance for catastrophic injury is exponentially higher than for any other sports activity.
00:16:34.920 | Cheerleading epitomizes some of the worst aspects of sports for girls.
00:16:38.600 | To begin with, there is a major emphasis on how you look.
00:16:42.520 | If you are playing volleyball, the coach isn't going to care (and shouldn't care) whether
00:16:46.320 | your socks match or whether your gym shorts have a smudge of dirt on them.
00:16:50.480 | But in cheerleading and related sports like drill team and dance team, you not only have
00:16:54.520 | to execute the stunt, you also have to look pretty and smile while you do it.
00:16:59.080 | In most jurisdictions, cheerleading is organized as an "activity" rather than a bona fide
00:17:04.720 | sport.
00:17:05.720 | That means that the safety requirements for the cheerleading squad are no different from
00:17:08.840 | the requirements for the chess team or the debate team.
00:17:11.960 | The chess team isn't required to have a certified athletic trainer in attendance.
00:17:15.920 | Neither are the cheerleaders.
00:17:17.440 | The coach of the debate team isn't required to be certified in injury assessment.
00:17:21.280 | Neither is the coach of the cheer squad.
00:17:23.280 | Ashley's life might have been saved if the adults in attendance had understood the risks
00:17:27.400 | of splenic injury after a fall and had called 911 immediately rather than waiting until
00:17:32.240 | Ashley lost consciousness.
00:17:34.640 | Cheerleading has changed dramatically over the past four decades.
00:17:37.960 | Thirty years ago, cheerleaders were usually girls who jumped up and down on the sidelines
00:17:41.760 | leading cheers.
00:17:43.320 | Nowadays, the emphasis, beginning around age 10, is on high-flying stunts.
00:17:48.800 | Today, cheerleading most closely resembles the sport of gymnastics, only without the
00:17:53.640 | mat and safety regulations, says former Massachusetts State Representative Peter Kutugian, who is
00:17:59.960 | trying to make cheerleading safer.
00:18:02.160 | Kimberly Archer, founder of the National Cheer Safety Foundation, says that the emphasis
00:18:06.960 | is on "death-defying, gravity-defying stunts.
00:18:10.160 | That's a long way from shaking pom-poms on the sidelines like I did in the '80s."
00:18:15.460 | If your daughter is five or six years old, you may think this advice doesn't apply.
00:18:19.840 | Nobody is going to ask your daughter to do an airborne somersault anytime soon.
00:18:24.280 | But there are long-term consequences to the choices that young girls make about which
00:18:27.940 | activities and sports they will participate in.
00:18:31.080 | Ask any girl over eight years of age which sports she likes the most, and the answer
00:18:35.480 | will almost invariably be whatever sports her friends do.
00:18:39.160 | If she joins midget poms at age six, she will probably want to carry on with her friends
00:18:44.040 | to junior cheer.
00:18:45.840 | At age 10, when she's been with the same girls for four years and the coach is beginning
00:18:49.120 | to teach them some airborne stunts, it may be difficult for you to suggest that she switch
00:18:53.200 | to a safer sport.
00:18:54.800 | She will say, "But all my friends are on the cheer squad!"
00:18:58.000 | And she may be right.
00:18:59.600 | It's much easier to steer your six-year-old daughter in a healthy direction than it is
00:19:03.280 | to ask your 10-year-old daughter to change her sport and her friends.
00:19:07.680 | Encourage your daughter to choose sports in which the emphasis is on what she does on
00:19:12.440 | the field of play, not on how she looks while she's doing it.
00:19:16.880 | Archery, badminton, field hockey, soccer, softball, swimming, tennis, track, and volleyball
00:19:22.400 | are all good choices by that criterion.
00:19:25.360 | Cheerleading, dance team, and gymnastics may not be good choices.
00:19:29.720 | The risks in cheerleading, dance team, and gymnastics often outweigh the benefits of
00:19:33.800 | exercise.
00:19:35.000 | The focus on appearance, on looking cute, is often relentless.
00:19:40.200 | Don't allow your daughter to specialize too early.
00:19:43.320 | Specializing in a sport before the onset of puberty appears to increase the risk of physical
00:19:47.640 | injury and mental burnout.
00:19:49.960 | According to an official policy paper from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP),
00:19:55.000 | those who participate in a variety of sports and specialize only after reaching the age
00:19:59.800 | of puberty tend to be more consistent performers, have fewer injuries, and adhere to sports
00:20:05.520 | longer than those who specialize early.
00:20:08.920 | A second AAP committee examining the same question came to the same conclusion.
00:20:13.080 | Young athletes who participate in a variety of sports have fewer injuries and play sports
00:20:17.440 | longer than those who specialize before puberty.
00:20:21.840 | The National Athletic Trainers Association recently issued similar guidelines.
00:20:26.000 | Kids should take at least two days a week off from their sport, should not specialize
00:20:30.360 | in one sport year-round, and should postpone specializing in one sport as long as possible.
00:20:35.900 | In his book about girls who get hurt playing sports, Michael Sokolov writes that "nearly
00:20:41.280 | every injured athlete I met in the course of researching this book played one sport
00:20:45.000 | exclusively beginning at age 10 or younger."
00:20:48.760 | By the way, to make clear, this section here on specialization is not specific to girls.
00:20:53.640 | It is applicable to girls, but it is not specific to girls.
00:20:56.520 | This is the same advice that other parents need to be paying attention to with regard
00:21:00.360 | to boys.
00:21:01.780 | And in our current kind of pedestalization of professional sports, there are many parents
00:21:07.880 | who are very much focusing on their children, their young children, specializing in a certain
00:21:14.480 | sport and taking advanced training in that sport with the hopes of reaching some very
00:21:19.740 | high level of performance in that sport.
00:21:22.480 | I've spent a good amount of time digging into this just out of my interest in trying to
00:21:26.380 | shore up my knowledge of athletics and knowledge of sport and how to prepare children for that
00:21:31.900 | and things like that.
00:21:33.520 | And universally this is condemned, universally by all trainers, coaches, everyone who's involved
00:21:43.360 | in that space who has the perspective of time.
00:21:47.540 | It is a key thing that is promoted basically by parents who are intent on, in the best
00:21:53.740 | of cases, helping their children to specialize in a particular sport that they really want
00:21:57.840 | to help them go to college.
00:22:00.600 | In the worst of cases, to live out some unfulfilled dream from the parent's own childhood, from
00:22:05.440 | the father's own childhood of what could have been if I had worked harder.
00:22:08.880 | But children should not be specializing in a certain sport.
00:22:12.560 | And so just broadly speaking, if you want your children to be strong and athletic, as
00:22:16.360 | I do, as we should, because, again, tying it with personal finance angle, it helps children
00:22:20.880 | to be strong.
00:22:21.880 | The competition is really important.
00:22:23.160 | There's all kinds of lessons that can be learned.
00:22:24.920 | All of these things are good things.
00:22:26.800 | But the best approach is do not specialize in a sport.
00:22:30.880 | Play multiple sports for multiple seasons so that there's variety.
00:22:35.880 | And there's huge cross-training benefits even for the long-term specialization.
00:22:40.800 | There's huge cross-training benefits that come from playing a multitude of sports.
00:22:46.560 | I like the idea.
00:22:47.560 | I heard recently, I was with a lady that my wife and I were having dinner with her.
00:22:54.260 | And she said her family's rule was always this, you have to always be playing a sport.
00:22:59.040 | You get to choose what it is, but you have to be playing a sport.
00:23:01.880 | That's an appropriate thing.
00:23:04.200 | And so if you look at the traditional schedule, at least in North America, where I'm familiar
00:23:08.000 | with it, where you have your fall sports, your winter sports, and your spring sports,
00:23:12.240 | this is an appropriate thing to have a short season, working on these sports skills during
00:23:16.100 | that time, and then having abundant amounts of time off.
00:23:19.280 | Back to the book.
00:23:20.560 | Don't allow your daughter to compete in the same sport year round.
00:23:23.840 | In the 1980s, it wasn't possible to play the same sport year round.
00:23:27.440 | There was soccer or field hockey in the fall, basketball in winter, and lacrosse or track
00:23:31.880 | or tennis in the spring.
00:23:33.460 | But beginning in the early 1990s, club teams and travel teams began to grow in popularity.
00:23:38.640 | Now it's common to find girls playing on a club team all year long.
00:23:42.560 | But the evidence strongly suggests that specializing in one sport and competing in that sport year
00:23:47.920 | round greatly increases the risk of injury.
00:23:51.900 | Each sport uses a particular group of muscles.
00:23:54.880 | Overdeveloping one set of muscles while neglecting the others throws the body out of alignment.
00:24:00.280 | There's a second reason, aside from the risk of injury, why your daughter should not compete
00:24:03.840 | in the same sport year round.
00:24:05.920 | If she's playing the same sport winter, spring, summer, and fall, she's likely going
00:24:10.280 | to be with the same group of girls for a great deal of time.
00:24:14.000 | Being respected and liked by those particular girls may become the highest priority in her
00:24:18.480 | life.
00:24:19.480 | If she sustains a minor injury, she will be less likely to mention her injury to anyone
00:24:24.080 | for fear that the doctor might restrict her participation.
00:24:27.140 | Her enthusiasm for the sport itself may wane, but she won't consider quitting the team,
00:24:32.420 | because that's where her friends are.
00:24:34.360 | The time commitment may be causing her grades to suffer, but she doesn't want to let her
00:24:37.480 | friends down.
00:24:39.200 | It's all about balance.
00:24:41.040 | Sports are great.
00:24:42.120 | But when a particular sport becomes an obsession, it's time for you to step in.
00:24:46.720 | You and your daughter have to find a sensible balance between risk and benefits.
00:24:51.080 | As Sokolov observes, "We can't prevent every injury, but what we are currently doing
00:24:55.840 | is manufacturing them."
00:24:57.920 | If you intended for a girl to suffer a major injury, you would take away all her other
00:25:02.400 | sports before puberty, make her play her one sport all year round, and then you would just
00:25:07.160 | wait.
00:25:08.320 | The earlier you make your intervention, the easier it will be.
00:25:11.420 | Too many parents today go with the flow until it's too late.
00:25:14.640 | We all want to be supportive of our daughter's interests.
00:25:17.440 | What could be healthier than sports?
00:25:19.720 | Sokolov describes parents of highly motivated girls, parents who are supportive of their
00:25:24.320 | daughters but bewildered by the culture.
00:25:26.800 | "The children, as often as not, are the ones leading the way," Sokolov found.
00:25:31.040 | "They do not so much put pressure on themselves as they absorb it from the youth sports culture.
00:25:37.040 | The parents get subsumed in ways they never anticipated."
00:25:40.720 | We had no idea what we were getting into, says one parent.
00:25:43.880 | You just feel your way as you go.
00:25:46.760 | Don't be that parent.
00:25:48.460 | Know what your daughter is getting into before it's too late.
00:25:51.360 | Don't be intimidated by the coach or by the culture.
00:25:54.420 | You know better than the coach what is best for your daughter.
00:25:57.720 | Your coach has a different agenda.
00:26:00.200 | He is concerned about winning.
00:26:02.500 | If your daughter is injured, emotionally or physically, it's not his problem.
00:26:06.040 | It's not going to keep him awake at night.
00:26:08.460 | There are other girls who can take her place.
00:26:11.560 | In the name of safety, don't allow your daughter to focus only on sports that involve
00:26:15.040 | the same muscle groups.
00:26:16.840 | A girl who plays soccer in the fall and runs track in the winter and spring is running
00:26:21.240 | all the time.
00:26:23.080 | Swimming would be a better winter sport for her, because swimming exercises different
00:26:26.840 | muscle groups, complementary to those used in running.
00:26:30.460 | Many parents, especially in the United States, assume that early specialization in a particular
00:26:34.560 | sport will give their daughter a competitive advantage.
00:26:37.560 | The evidence doesn't support that notion.
00:26:40.240 | Colleen Hacker, who has served as a psychologist for U.S. women's soccer for more than 20 years,
00:26:44.960 | told Sokolove, "The big misconception is thinking that there is a linear connection
00:26:49.320 | between the development of a young athlete and the time spent being coached, attending
00:26:53.560 | organized practices, and playing organized games.
00:26:57.120 | There's no support for that.
00:26:58.880 | There may be a belief and a hope, but not evidence."
00:27:02.940 | The most successful athletes, the ones who make it to the Olympics, usually have a history
00:27:06.780 | of playing many sports, specializing only once they reach their teens.
00:27:11.760 | Diversity of experience, cross-training, makes the body stronger, better coordinated, and
00:27:16.920 | less prone to injury.
00:27:18.600 | Dr. Hacker expresses frustration that so many parents don't understand this basic reality
00:27:23.920 | about the developing human body.
00:27:26.580 | This message, about the importance of athletic diversity, is not getting across, she says.
00:27:32.320 | We need to encourage parents, coaches, sports leagues, and the culture itself to go back
00:27:36.920 | to multiple sports participation, and there needs to be real off-seasons with unstructured
00:27:42.400 | play.
00:27:43.400 | No adults, no rules, no leagues, no registration cards.
00:27:47.420 | One of the best sentences a parent can utter is, "Go outside and play."
00:27:52.000 | One of the worst is, "It's 9 a.m., get in the car, we're going to practice."
00:27:57.160 | Not all girls care about team sports.
00:27:59.960 | Some girls do care passionately about team competition, about victory and defeat.
00:28:05.460 | For those girls, the traditional sports of soccer, basketball, and baseball or softball
00:28:09.960 | may be a good match.
00:28:11.520 | But many girls are not particularly motivated by the opportunity to bash the other team.
00:28:16.200 | If you have the sense that your daughter might be such a girl, try to expose her to a wide
00:28:20.160 | range of activities, including those that don't necessarily involve team competition
00:28:24.520 | – martial arts, fencing, and archery, to name three.
00:28:28.220 | Some of these sports can be done in a team-competitive way, but they don't have to be, and often
00:28:33.400 | are not.
00:28:35.800 | A girl's knee is not a boy's knee.
00:28:38.800 | The most popular team sports, such as soccer, baseball, and basketball, were developed mainly
00:28:43.400 | by men to be played by men and boys.
00:28:46.640 | In the past 50 years, girls have begun playing these sports in record numbers.
00:28:50.640 | For the most part, they are playing boys' sports according to boys' rules, and they
00:28:54.240 | are usually coached by men.
00:28:56.440 | Few people have asked whether these sports should be modified to make them safe for girls.
00:29:01.440 | Many people bristle when this question is raised.
00:29:03.540 | "Are you suggesting that girls are not as tough as boys?" one parent asked me.
00:29:08.400 | On the contrary, girls seem to be tougher.
00:29:11.400 | If the criterion of toughness is how severe an injury is needed to knock the athlete out
00:29:15.300 | of the game, girls and young women appear to be more willing to play while injured compared
00:29:19.980 | to same-age boys.
00:29:22.280 | But girls are different.
00:29:23.840 | When researchers tested girls and boys at 8 years of age, they found that girls' quadriceps
00:29:28.680 | were very strong relative to their hamstrings, while boys had more of a balance between their
00:29:33.540 | hamstrings and quadriceps.
00:29:35.880 | In case you're a bit weak on anatomy, the quadriceps is the foreheaded muscle on top
00:29:39.800 | of your thigh bone that straightens your leg.
00:29:42.120 | The hamstrings are the muscles in the back of your thigh that bend your leg.
00:29:46.720 | Puberty exacerbates these differences.
00:29:49.200 | As a girl's hips widen, her Q angle increases.
00:29:53.480 | The Q angle is the angle formed by the femur (the thigh bone) in relation to the vertical.
00:29:59.240 | The widening of the pelvis that is a normal part of puberty in girls leads to a larger
00:30:03.760 | Q angle for young women.
00:30:06.000 | As a result, activities that involve the quadriceps (activities such as running, jumping, or kicking
00:30:10.800 | a ball) create a more severe torque on the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in girls
00:30:17.520 | than in boys.
00:30:19.200 | Fatigue stresses the female knee differently and more severely compared with the male knee.
00:30:24.360 | A girl's leg responds differently to a run-and-cut maneuver compared with a boy's executing
00:30:29.400 | the same maneuver.
00:30:31.000 | As a result, girl gymnasts are more than five times as likely to injure their knees compared
00:30:36.440 | to boy gymnasts.
00:30:38.360 | Girls playing basketball are more than twice as likely to rupture their ACL than boys playing
00:30:43.280 | basketball.
00:30:44.920 | College women are four to six times more likely to injure their ACLs than men playing the
00:30:49.800 | same sport at the same level of competition.
00:30:53.120 | The consequences of knee injuries can be significant and long-lasting.
00:30:57.500 | If your daughter experiences an ACL injury, there is more than a 50/50 chance that she
00:31:02.500 | will develop significant arthritis in that knee within 7 to 20 years after the injury.
00:31:08.360 | She may need a knee replacement by the time she's in her 30s.
00:31:12.400 | Girls who are injured are more likely to be re-injured compared with boys who suffer the
00:31:16.360 | same injury playing the same sport.
00:31:18.900 | This is not because girls are more fragile than boys, but because the entire culture
00:31:23.840 | of sport has developed around what works for boys, not what works for girls.
00:31:29.360 | For example, consider how coaches usually warm up their players before a game.
00:31:34.360 | Generations of men have prepared boys before a game by having the boys run a few laps around
00:31:38.200 | the track or do some jumping jacks or simple stretching exercises.
00:31:42.520 | That may be fine for boys, but it's not helpful for girls.
00:31:46.400 | Orthopedic specialists designed a completely different warm-up routine based on girl-boy
00:31:50.880 | differences in anatomy.
00:31:53.000 | The girls' warm-up routine should involve, among other things, running backward, as well
00:31:57.880 | as prone hamstring flexion exercises.
00:32:01.180 | It doesn't cost any more money or time than the boys' routine.
00:32:04.760 | It doesn't require any special equipment.
00:32:07.260 | But it's different.
00:32:09.520 | When girls do these "girl-specific" routines before practice and competition, the risk
00:32:14.260 | of ACL injury is reduced by an astonishing 88% compared with girls on comparable teams
00:32:20.520 | doing the traditional warm-up.
00:32:23.320 | Ask the coaches of your daughter's team whether they are aware of this "girl-specific"
00:32:27.640 | warm-up and its proven benefits.
00:32:30.360 | If they aren't, make sure they learn.
00:32:33.960 | A girl's head is not a boy's head.
00:32:37.320 | Samantha Furstenberg was a top-ranked high school lacrosse player.
00:32:41.180 | She was sprinting with the ball toward the opposing goal in a high school game.
00:32:45.400 | Three girls defending the goal tried to stop her.
00:32:48.580 | At least one girl whacked her in the head with a lacrosse stick.
00:32:52.120 | Samantha never lost consciousness, but she didn't feel right.
00:32:55.680 | She sat out of the game for a few minutes, then she went back in.
00:33:00.200 | Samantha had suffered a concussion.
00:33:02.200 | For several days, she was nauseated, felt dizzy, and had difficulty thinking clearly.
00:33:08.060 | Her parents took her to see a specialist at Children's Hospital in Washington, D.C.
00:33:12.560 | When her symptoms persisted, Samantha and her parents traveled to consult another specialist
00:33:17.080 | at the University of Pittsburgh.
00:33:19.360 | Even three weeks later, her symptoms were nearly as bad as they had been the day after
00:33:22.880 | the game.
00:33:24.040 | She couldn't focus for more than 10 or 15 minutes at a time.
00:33:27.400 | It took months for her to recover fully.
00:33:30.520 | More than a year later, Samantha sustained a second concussion during a lacrosse match.
00:33:35.600 | But she wouldn't give up the sport.
00:33:37.760 | She was recruited by Colgate to play NCAA Division I lacrosse.
00:33:41.840 | However, just a few days before she was to leave for Colgate, she bumped her head while
00:33:45.680 | tubing on a lake.
00:33:47.480 | The headaches and dizziness returned.
00:33:50.340 | After consulting with specialists, Samantha decided to leave the team and end her career
00:33:55.180 | as a competitive lacrosse player.
00:33:57.920 | The risks were too great.
00:33:59.800 | "Over the next few months, I struggled to define myself without lacrosse shaping who
00:34:04.320 | I was and what I did," she told me.
00:34:07.960 | She decided to transfer from Colgate to Georgetown, and she took up long-distance running.
00:34:13.480 | One year later, she ran the Marine Corps Marathon for the Make-A-Wish Foundation.
00:34:16.800 | "But I definitely miss playing lacrosse," she told me at the time.
00:34:22.240 | Most team sports are played by the same rules for girls and for boys at the high school
00:34:26.160 | and college level.
00:34:28.200 | Lacrosse is a notable exception.
00:34:30.640 | Boys are required to wear helmets while playing lacrosse.
00:34:34.240 | Girls aren't.
00:34:35.340 | The reason given is that boys' lacrosse is a contact sport.
00:34:39.160 | Boys are allowed to make physical contact with other boys.
00:34:42.440 | Girls' lacrosse is supposedly a non-contact sport because girls are not supposed to make
00:34:47.200 | intentional physical contact with other girls.
00:34:51.000 | For most of the past century, research on sports-related head injuries meant research
00:34:55.640 | on sports-related head injuries for boys and men.
00:34:59.400 | Even though girls and women have been playing competitive sports for decades, the first
00:35:02.960 | attempt at a thorough investigation of the risk for girls compared to boys wasn't published
00:35:07.940 | until 2007.
00:35:10.520 | That study, undertaken by the NCAA in association with Ohio State University and based on data
00:35:15.800 | from 100 high schools and 180 universities across the United States, demonstrated that
00:35:21.720 | girls playing high school soccer have a risk of concussion 60% higher than boys.
00:35:28.560 | Girls playing high school basketball have a risk of concussion 300% higher than boys.
00:35:35.000 | Which NCAA has the highest concussion rate measured as a number of concussions per time
00:35:39.440 | rate?
00:35:40.720 | If you said football, you'd be wrong.
00:35:43.840 | The college sport that carries the highest risk of concussion is women's ice hockey.
00:35:49.400 | Women playing ice hockey have more than double the risk of concussion than men playing college
00:35:54.120 | football.
00:35:55.760 | In every sport played by both girls and boys—basketball, soccer, ice hockey, lacrosse—girls' risk
00:36:01.840 | of concussion is significantly higher than the risk for boys.
00:36:06.720 | One can imagine several possible explanations.
00:36:09.400 | However, the most plausible explanation is that girls' heads are built differently
00:36:13.800 | from boys' heads.
00:36:15.840 | Consider the lateral ventricles, which are basically big holes in the brain that contain
00:36:19.600 | nothing but cerebrospinal fluid, the watery liquid that encases and insulates the brain.
00:36:25.440 | These fluid-filled holes in the brain are significantly bigger in boys than in girls,
00:36:30.120 | even after adjusting for any differences in overall body size.
00:36:33.840 | The lateral ventricles act as fluid-filled hydraulic shock absorbers.
00:36:38.720 | If a boy's head collides with a soccer ball, the odds of damage are lower than if a girl's
00:36:43.840 | head collides with the same soccer ball.
00:36:46.360 | That makes sense if the boy's lateral ventricles are bigger than the girls'.
00:36:50.200 | He has more empty space in his head to absorb the blow.
00:36:53.920 | Some have suggested that maybe the reason that girls have a greater risk of concussion
00:36:57.860 | is merely because girls are, on average, smaller than boys.
00:37:02.280 | That hypothesis doesn't fit the facts.
00:37:05.360 | Girls are more likely to have a concussion compared with boys of the same size, and girls
00:37:09.720 | are more likely to suffer lasting cognitive deficits after concussion than boys are.
00:37:15.880 | These sex differences are not attributable to differences in overall size or body mass,
00:37:20.760 | according to researchers who have carefully controlled for these variables.
00:37:24.040 | Dr. Joseph Blyberg is a clinical neuropsychologist with a particular interest in head injuries.
00:37:30.240 | He says that comparing the male and female skull and brain is "like comparing an SUV
00:37:35.840 | and a Volkswagen bug.
00:37:37.600 | The same level of impact is probably not going to cause the same level of damage."
00:37:43.120 | What should we, as parents, do to minimize the risk of our daughters suffering a significant
00:37:47.240 | head injury?
00:37:48.240 | First, I think it's wise to try to steer your daughter away from the highest risk sports,
00:37:53.960 | such as ice hockey, figure skating, and gymnastics.
00:37:57.120 | Second, if your daughter is going to play an intermediate risk sport, such as soccer
00:38:01.660 | or lacrosse or basketball, I think you should insist that she wear the new headband-style
00:38:06.800 | protective gear.
00:38:08.520 | These devices look like overgrown headbands, but they act like helmets.
00:38:13.200 | One example is the Full 90 (www.full90.com), which comes complete with an opening for your
00:38:20.800 | daughter's ponytail in the back.
00:38:22.640 | Just make sure she doesn't regard the helmet as a license to kill.
00:38:26.360 | Third, insist that the coach and staff have appropriate training in recognizing the signs
00:38:31.420 | of concussion, including sex differences in the presentation of concussion.
00:38:37.120 | Male coaches, whose experience has been mostly with boys, may not be aware that girls are
00:38:41.840 | at higher risk for concussion.
00:38:44.200 | They may not be as thorough in assessing a girl for concussion after she has been knocked
00:38:48.940 | in the head but hasn't lost consciousness.
00:38:51.160 | I spoke with Samantha again in November 2019, ten years after our previous conversation.
00:38:58.360 | What had happened in the years since?
00:39:00.840 | Samantha explained that her doctor advised her against returning to lacrosse or any sport
00:39:04.800 | with a high risk of head injury.
00:39:06.780 | The danger of another concussion and lasting disability was just too great.
00:39:10.680 | Instead, she plunged into endurance sports, and I use the word "plunge" literally.
00:39:16.040 | In addition to running marathons, Samantha has completed three full Ironman competitions.
00:39:20.680 | The Ironman competition begins with a 2.4-mile swim, followed by a 112-mile bike race, followed
00:39:26.600 | by a 26.2-mile marathon.
00:39:29.280 | She now ranks in the top 5% of Ironman athletes worldwide.
00:39:33.340 | She has also completed several half-Ironman competitions and a number of marathons, and
00:39:37.640 | she has coached girls high school lacrosse.
00:39:40.920 | Samantha graduated from Georgetown with a double major in math and psychology.
00:39:44.920 | She then went on to the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she earned a master's
00:39:48.200 | degree.
00:39:49.400 | After three years teaching sixth-grade math, she returned to graduate school to earn a
00:39:52.980 | second master's degree, this one in educational innovation, simultaneously with an MBA, both
00:39:59.160 | at the University of Virginia.
00:40:01.100 | She hopes someday to launch her own K-12 school.
00:40:04.440 | In her TEDxTalks, Samantha is frank about how she felt when she realized she would never
00:40:08.460 | play lacrosse again.
00:40:10.460 | She felt that she had failed.
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00:40:29.320 | They have the inventory, over 800 vehicles ready for immediate delivery.
00:40:32.620 | You don't even have to hop off the 405 at Roscoe.
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00:40:37.080 | It's GalpinFord.com.
00:40:38.080 | 1-800-GO-GALPIN or hop off the 405 at Roscoe.
00:40:41.200 | Ask for Mike Schwartz or Paul Ulbrich.
00:40:43.600 | Nothing brought me joy, she said.
00:40:46.180 | Being in marathons and Ironman events helped her to overcome that low.
00:40:50.800 | I asked Samantha what advice she would have for other girls struggling to recover after
00:40:55.160 | concussion.
00:40:56.160 | "Listen to your doctor," she said.
00:40:58.440 | "If they tell you to take a week off of school, do it.
00:41:01.400 | Try to find someone else who has gone through it.
00:41:03.520 | And remember, this too shall pass."
00:41:07.460 | A girl's bones are not a boy's bones.
00:41:11.200 | When I was a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania back in the 1980s, we were
00:41:14.800 | taught that osteoporosis, brittle bones, is something that happens mostly to older women.
00:41:21.000 | By the way, let me interrupt here for a moment.
00:41:23.360 | Pay attention carefully to this point because the reason I do this kind of stuff, these
00:41:29.000 | kinds of topics, is to try to help you understand what you can do when your children are young.
00:41:36.560 | As I've stated many times on the podcast, why don't I not talk about college savings
00:41:41.680 | accounts every day?
00:41:42.840 | Well, because with regard to preparing for education, it's inferior to basically every
00:41:47.680 | other thing that I can come up with.
00:41:49.200 | Same thing here with medical stuff.
00:41:52.020 | We want to avoid osteoporosis at a late age, but listen to how early you have to be aware
00:41:57.560 | of this.
00:41:58.760 | Back to the book.
00:42:00.560 | When I was a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania back in the 1980s, we were
00:42:03.400 | taught that osteoporosis, brittle bones, is something that happens mostly to older women.
00:42:09.080 | Today, doctors recognize that although osteoporosis usually manifests in women over 60 years of
00:42:16.800 | age, it is best understood as a disease that begins in childhood, caused by the failure
00:42:23.280 | to build sufficient bone in childhood and adolescence.
00:42:27.240 | A girl makes most of her bone between 6 and 17 years of age.
00:42:31.680 | By the time she's 17, a young woman has acquired more than 90% of all the bone mineral
00:42:36.800 | she will ever have.
00:42:39.020 | After about age 24, it's mostly downhill.
00:42:42.140 | I'm not saying that women in their 40s can't do anything about their bone density, but
00:42:46.840 | if your bones are strong at age 20, you're in good shape.
00:42:50.160 | If your bone density is significantly below average at age 20, it's going to be a real
00:42:53.800 | struggle to make up the difference when you're in your 40s or 50s.
00:42:57.440 | It's much easier for women over age 30 to maintain their bone density than to try to
00:43:02.640 | build bone they should have built when they were younger.
00:43:06.040 | So, your daughter needs to exercise right, and she needs to eat right.
00:43:11.840 | Researchers at Oregon State University randomly assigned children 6 to 8 years old either
00:43:16.120 | to jumping or stretching exercise.
00:43:19.520 | The jumpers were asked to jump off a 2-foot box 100 times, 3 days a week for 7 months.
00:43:26.160 | The stretchers did stretching exercises for an equivalent length of time.
00:43:30.560 | There were no differences in bone density between the two groups of kids when they enrolled
00:43:34.400 | in the study, but at the end of the 7 months, the kids who had been assigned to the jumping
00:43:38.780 | exercise had significantly stronger bones than the kids who were assigned to the stretching
00:43:43.280 | exercise.
00:43:44.880 | Even more important, significant improvements in bone density relative to the control group
00:43:49.480 | were still in evidence 7 years after the intervention ended, for girls as well as for boys.
00:43:56.320 | In a separate study by Canadian researchers, 10-year-old girls were randomly assigned either
00:44:01.120 | to high-impact exercise, lots of jumping, for 10 minutes at a time, 3 times a week,
00:44:07.000 | or to regular physical education for the same amount of time.
00:44:10.760 | After 2 years, the girls who had been assigned to be jumpers had stronger bones than the
00:44:15.480 | girls who had been assigned to regular PE, even though there was no difference in bone
00:44:20.080 | density at the beginning of the study.
00:44:22.960 | Every able-bodied girl can do jumping exercises.
00:44:26.160 | It doesn't require any special athletic talent or any special training for staff or
00:44:30.900 | any expensive equipment.
00:44:34.260 | So your daughter needs to exercise and so do you.
00:44:36.720 | You have to practice what you preach.
00:44:38.580 | It's great if your school's PE instructor is familiar with this research, but you can
00:44:42.320 | do these exercises with her yourself.
00:44:44.900 | Don't rely on your daughter's school or the coach of her team to make sure she gets enough
00:44:48.520 | exercise.
00:44:49.900 | It's your responsibility to get her out of the house, jumping up and down in the field
00:44:53.760 | or at the park or wherever.
00:44:55.460 | The earlier you start, the better.
00:44:57.660 | By 8 years of age, girls who are more active have significantly stronger bones than girls
00:45:02.420 | who are less active.
00:45:04.280 | Let me interrupt here for a moment.
00:45:07.180 | This is, if you remember in the episode where I talked about height, I emphasized high-impact
00:45:12.340 | activities.
00:45:13.340 | Now, interestingly, this is one of those things that when I said it, some people I would guess
00:45:18.060 | would say, "Wait a second.
00:45:19.060 | Why do we want high-impact activities?"
00:45:21.060 | As you get older, one of the things people are always looking for is, "I want low-impact
00:45:24.140 | activities, right?
00:45:25.140 | I want an elliptical trainer instead of running because it's lower impact."
00:45:28.380 | But it's really, really important that young people, young children and adolescents get
00:45:33.400 | lots of high-impact activity, and it's specifically important for what we're talking about here,
00:45:38.740 | for building the bone.
00:45:40.180 | As I understand it, not being a medical doctor, not even being an expert on this, just trying
00:45:43.680 | to consume what I can learn, as I understand it, bones respond to stress.
00:45:49.180 | And so one of the most important things to do to build strong bones is to stress the
00:45:53.180 | bones quite a lot.
00:45:55.020 | And stress can be stress through heavy weight, but it also should be the stress of heavy
00:46:00.580 | impact.
00:46:01.860 | And so it's very important that children engage in lots of high-impact activity because the
00:46:07.180 | physical force involved of impact, of jumping off of a two-foot-tall box, is much, much
00:46:12.580 | higher really than even can be put on with heavy weight-bearing exercises.
00:46:17.260 | So both are important, heavy weight-bearing exercises and impact.
00:46:20.780 | But impact is that thing that continually creates little fractures in the bone, little
00:46:25.280 | micro fractures, and is the thing that can lead to growth.
00:46:31.260 | So in the "Growing Taller" episode, I focused on how you can grow your bones and grow taller
00:46:36.560 | due to that impact.
00:46:38.360 | We talked briefly about the micro fractures and stretching them out even for growth of
00:46:42.500 | bone potential beyond puberty.
00:46:45.540 | That's not in any way accepted by medical science.
00:46:47.260 | It's something that the bros are trying out.
00:46:49.820 | And we'll tell if it works or not.
00:46:52.020 | But for young people, for children, this jumping is really important.
00:46:55.540 | So everything you can have that involves jumping is important.
00:46:58.460 | Some of the things that I found that to work is, number one, children love to jump.
00:47:03.820 | Like it's super fun.
00:47:04.820 | So get yourself some plyo boxes, ideally some soft ones, and stretch them out.
00:47:09.500 | I find that my children love to jump up and down on the boxes and do the plyometric exercises.
00:47:13.460 | They just think jumping is fun.
00:47:15.140 | And then I always make sure that they jump off the plyo boxes as well as jumping on to
00:47:19.660 | try to get as much impact as possible.
00:47:21.740 | And I build it up to the highest height possible.
00:47:25.580 | I've also been teaching my children to do parachute landing falls with the idea that,
00:47:29.980 | again, they can sustain higher levels of impact and encourage them to jump off repeatedly
00:47:34.500 | so that they build bones.
00:47:35.540 | And then repetitive jumping exercise, things like jump ropes are amazing for the body.
00:47:40.160 | Just lots and lots of jumping, amazing for the muscles, amazing for the body.
00:47:43.120 | So get your children, especially your girls, jump ropes and get them on there every day.
00:47:47.940 | As with every other aspect of development we've considered here, the rule is this,
00:47:51.240 | everything in moderation.
00:47:53.620 | Girls who over-exercise and get too skinny put themselves at risk for stress fractures.
00:47:58.340 | That's especially true for girls in track, gymnastics, and cheerleading.
00:48:01.980 | Too much of one kind of exercise without cross-training is not a good thing.
00:48:06.260 | As for eating right, forget everything you've learned from studies of boys or men.
00:48:10.820 | Diet doesn't seem to matter as much in building boys' bones compared to girls'.
00:48:14.580 | Girls, for starters, must drink plenty of milk and avoid cola beverages.
00:48:20.980 | Consumption of cola beverages is linked to lower bone density and fractures in girls.
00:48:25.300 | This appears to be true of older women as well.
00:48:28.220 | Drinking soft drinks is associated with brittle bones in teenage girls, but not in teenage
00:48:32.700 | boys.
00:48:34.100 | Girls who drink plenty of milk have stronger bones compared with girls who are equally
00:48:37.920 | well-nourished but who don't drink much milk.
00:48:40.860 | Other sources of calcium in the diet do not appear to be able to compensate for not drinking
00:48:45.580 | milk.
00:48:46.580 | There may be more to the story than just calcium.
00:48:49.240 | Recent research suggests that there are some as-yet-unknown factors in milk that help to
00:48:53.420 | build strong bones, especially in girls.
00:48:56.380 | Soy milk, rice milk, and almond milk are increasingly popular.
00:49:00.500 | While some dairy farms are closing due to lack of demand for cow's milk, manufacturers
00:49:05.000 | of plant-based alternatives report difficulty keeping up with the surging appetite for their
00:49:09.340 | product.
00:49:10.340 | I encounter parents who believe that these alternatives deliver nutritional benefits
00:49:13.800 | compared to real milk.
00:49:15.780 | Those parents are mistaken.
00:49:18.940 | One team of pediatricians reported cases of toddlers right here in the United States who
00:49:23.160 | showed signs of advanced malnutrition.
00:49:25.940 | Quasiorcor and Ricketts normally encountered only among severely impoverished families
00:49:31.100 | in the third world.
00:49:32.660 | The parents were well-educated and caring.
00:49:35.040 | They thought they were doing the best thing for their child by giving their child soy
00:49:38.100 | milk or rice milk rather than actual milk.
00:49:42.000 | The authors note that it is misleading to use the term "milk" for these beverages.
00:49:46.120 | They prefer the term "soy beverage" rather than "soy milk."
00:49:49.880 | These authors note that the parents of one toddler assumed that they were providing their
00:49:53.620 | toddler with superior nutrition because of the fortified status and relatively high cost
00:49:57.680 | of the beverage.
00:49:59.240 | But the beverage in question, like many rice, soy, or almond milks, provided less than one
00:50:05.520 | tenth the protein found in cow's milk, 1.7 grams of protein per liter, compared with
00:50:10.840 | 33 grams of protein per liter in cow's milk.
00:50:14.520 | Your daughter needs to drink milk.
00:50:17.420 | Milk from a cow.
00:50:18.800 | Or a goat.
00:50:19.800 | Soy milk doesn't count.
00:50:21.480 | Almond milk doesn't count.
00:50:23.200 | If necessary, you could let her drink flavored milk.
00:50:26.200 | Girls who drink flavored milk do not become fatter than girls who drink unflavored milk.
00:50:30.760 | Girls who are lactose intolerant need to take special measures.
00:50:33.920 | So, give your 5-year-old daughter her very own little bottle of strawberry-flavored milk.
00:50:39.160 | Don't wait until puberty.
00:50:40.880 | In one study, investigators measured bone density in 8-year-olds, then followed the
00:50:45.240 | children until they were 16 years old.
00:50:48.880 | Girls who had brittle bones at age 8 were significantly more likely to break their bones
00:50:53.760 | by the age of 16 compared with girls who had strong bones at age 8.
00:50:59.840 | Let me add here just a couple of quick comments on the milk thing that may be helpful to some
00:51:02.960 | people.
00:51:04.200 | If your family is already a family of milk drinkers, great.
00:51:08.200 | What's interesting is that there are a lot of people who used to be milk drinkers that
00:51:11.800 | stopped.
00:51:12.800 | I was one of those.
00:51:13.800 | When I was younger, we didn't have milk every day with every meal.
00:51:17.080 | That wasn't kind of the family culture, but I wasn't discouraged from drinking milk.
00:51:20.800 | I stopped drinking milk when I was in my teens because I decided that milk was making me
00:51:25.280 | fat and I was concerned about the impact of dairy on acne.
00:51:29.680 | And so I stopped drinking milk because it was just too many calories and I didn't want
00:51:33.760 | to be fat.
00:51:34.760 | My wife didn't ever come from a milk-drinking family, and so we weren't in the habit of
00:51:38.560 | drinking milk.
00:51:39.560 | I also used to be super suspicious of conventionally raised milk.
00:51:43.760 | I got super suspicious of the hormone risks, the risks of all the hormones that the cows
00:51:48.560 | are given, and I got really worried about that.
00:51:52.080 | And over the years, I became very suspicious of milk.
00:51:55.720 | I believe now that, again, my understanding as a layman, I believe that I was wrong to
00:52:00.560 | be as suspicious as I was back then.
00:52:03.000 | The hormones and other issues of things that I was worried about are not as big of a risk
00:52:08.280 | as I thought they were.
00:52:10.440 | And milk should be something that should be consumed consistently.
00:52:13.760 | I used to make fun of the got milk ads about calcium also, about the bioavailability of
00:52:18.240 | calcium.
00:52:19.240 | I thought, well, there's things you read from the medical people about how the calcium doesn't
00:52:22.920 | get absorbed.
00:52:23.920 | And so I thought it was all a bunch of bunk.
00:52:25.420 | I believe now that I was wrong.
00:52:27.120 | So I think we should encourage milk consumption.
00:52:29.920 | It seems to me that milk consumption, from what I understand, it's important to, whenever
00:52:33.680 | possible, pair milk consumption with vitamin D. Obviously, we want lots of sunshine, and
00:52:39.840 | so perhaps your body can create vitamin D, but most people are vitamin D deficient.
00:52:44.000 | So taking a vitamin D supplement alongside the milk, as I understand it, is a very smart
00:52:48.560 | thing to do and really helps in the absorption of calcium.
00:52:52.160 | And it really does help our children's bones to grow better.
00:52:55.360 | And then in order to really be useful, it should be something that is served regularly.
00:52:59.400 | So I grew up in a family where we never drank milk with meals, and I would go to some places
00:53:03.520 | where people would say, "Hey, would your children like milk?"
00:53:05.400 | And I was like, "No, we wouldn't like milk."
00:53:07.120 | I now think that children having milk with their meal is probably one of the best things
00:53:11.360 | that they can do to consume the protein, have the calcium, and have the calories that come
00:53:17.680 | from milk.
00:53:18.880 | So you may have to deal with lactose issues separately.
00:53:22.440 | There are some people who have issues with that.
00:53:23.980 | What I do is make as much as possible raw milk.
00:53:27.060 | That's a separate controversial subject, but it seems persuasive to me, the benefits of
00:53:30.760 | raw milk as compared to pasteurized milk.
00:53:33.120 | So if possible, get yourself a source of raw milk, but you do your own research on that
00:53:38.640 | and feed it consistently.
00:53:40.580 | So a little bit before every meal and get your children in the habit of that, especially
00:53:44.240 | your girls.
00:53:45.240 | It's really important.
00:53:46.240 | The current craze for soy milk here and almond milk there needs to be ended.
00:53:49.520 | Oh, and by the way, milk is one of your cheapest sources of high quality calories that you
00:53:53.120 | can get.
00:53:54.120 | For your teenage boys who are trying to put on weight, while the GOMAD diet, the G-O-M-A-D
00:53:59.400 | gallon of milk a day diet is not the perfect thing, it's a time proven way for your teenage
00:54:04.720 | boys to bulk up.
00:54:06.380 | The promise and perils of exercise.
00:54:08.760 | The evidence suggests that girls who are involved in sports are more likely to remain active
00:54:13.600 | through adolescence, when other girls generally become less active.
00:54:18.620 | Girls who are involved in vigorous physical activities, including but not limited to
00:54:22.060 | organized sports, also appear to be at lower risk for becoming depressed.
00:54:27.060 | And that protective effect holds true regardless of body mass index or even fitness.
00:54:33.280 | In other words, an overweight girl who exercises regularly is less likely to become depressed
00:54:38.640 | than an equally heavy girl who doesn't exercise.
00:54:41.720 | And girls who exercise regularly are less likely to feel tired.
00:54:46.120 | Exercise has all sorts of benefits that have nothing to do with how much you weigh or how
00:54:49.840 | you look.
00:54:51.200 | But some girls exercise too vigorously or for the wrong reasons.
00:54:56.360 | One study of girls age 9 to 16 found that 46% of girls want to look like a female celebrity.
00:55:03.440 | And that's part of the reason why they exercise.
00:55:06.200 | That's not a healthy motivation.
00:55:08.200 | It's other referenced rather than self referenced.
00:55:11.680 | The goal should be to help girls have realistic and healthy body images and recognize the
00:55:16.980 | importance of physical activity for overall health and well-being, not just for appearance
00:55:21.800 | focused reasons.
00:55:23.640 | Lauren Fleshman is a veteran of collegiate sports.
00:55:26.840 | As an undergraduate at Stanford, she won five NCAA titles in track and field and was a 15
00:55:31.920 | time All-American.
00:55:33.620 | She observed firsthand other female athletes who were starving themselves.
00:55:37.940 | She blamed that on a sports system built by and for men.
00:55:42.360 | I certainly agree that when young women are coached by men who have had no training in
00:55:45.760 | the gender-specific strategies that work best for girls and women, and who may have inaccurate
00:55:50.320 | stereotyped beliefs about female athletes, such as the mistaken belief that female athletes
00:55:55.060 | must be rail thin in order to win, then bad things often happen.
00:55:59.440 | Many girls are on the edge of an unhealthy obsession when it comes to exercise.
00:56:03.520 | Some girls fall over that edge.
00:56:05.960 | Obsessive exercise can be hazardous to your health.
00:56:09.560 | Researchers at San Diego State University interviewed girls at six different California
00:56:12.920 | high schools and found that 18% of girls playing interscholastic sports reported disordered
00:56:17.960 | eating attitudes or behaviors.
00:56:20.320 | Almost one in four, 23.5%, had irregular menstrual periods.
00:56:25.620 | Almost as many girls, 21.8%, had low bone density.
00:56:29.940 | In another study, young women who participated in sports where leanness is desirable, sports
00:56:34.080 | such as gymnastics, were almost twice as likely to have irregular menstrual periods compared
00:56:38.880 | to young women participating at the same level of competition in sports such as softball,
00:56:43.960 | where leanness is not essential.
00:56:45.840 | 24.8% of girls in lean sports compared with 13.1% of girls in other sports.
00:56:51.320 | We discussed the athletic triad, the association of excessive exercise with brittle bones,
00:56:57.400 | disordered eating, and the loss of the menstrual period back in chapter three.
00:57:00.720 | I really want you to get this book and read it.
00:57:02.400 | I'm not going to go back to chapter three.
00:57:03.720 | I'm already sharing an enormous amount here from this chapter on the body.
00:57:09.280 | But this topic of irregular menstruation for young women is enormously important.
00:57:15.960 | We are facing an absolute fertility crisis, and this particular factor of the impact of
00:57:22.320 | sports on regular menstruation for women is something that I find just in personal conversations
00:57:28.860 | with people struggling, with couples struggling with fertility, is fairly common and fairly
00:57:34.080 | prevalent.
00:57:35.080 | And losing your fertilities to a stupid sport and becoming so excessively skinny that your
00:57:41.480 | body can no longer menstruate such that you have to spend tens of thousands of dollars
00:57:46.120 | in your 20s and 30s for every one of your babies seems to me one of the stupidest financial
00:57:51.000 | decisions that you can possibly make.
00:57:53.140 | It's very annoying as a financial planner to end working with couples who aren't able
00:57:57.480 | to conceive babies naturally without external intervention.
00:58:01.320 | It's very annoying to have to reorganize the entire budget to spend tens of thousands of
00:58:07.480 | dollars for every baby conceived.
00:58:09.980 | That makes the cost of having children enormous, and it wrecks all kinds of other things.
00:58:14.740 | And a significant component of it can be avoided through information and proper practice.
00:58:19.880 | So don't let your daughters get so skinny that their bodies stop working.
00:58:23.300 | It's absurd and it has to end.
00:58:25.920 | On the one hand, you don't want your daughter to obsess about her weight.
00:58:28.860 | On the other hand, girls who are out of shape are at greater risk not only for overweight
00:58:32.480 | and obesity, but also for depression and fatigue.
00:58:35.560 | How can you encourage the right kind of healthy exercise without pushing your daughter over
00:58:39.160 | the edge?
00:58:40.360 | In order to answer those questions, we need to understand the role that culture plays
00:58:44.200 | and the role played by something psychologists call social contrast effects.
00:58:50.400 | What do girls in Chicago have in common with Hopi girls in Arizona?
00:58:55.040 | Carol Cronin-Weisfeld and her colleagues wanted to understand how much of the difference in
00:58:59.000 | girls' and boys' interest in sports is due to culture, and how much might be due
00:59:03.720 | to other factors, perhaps psychological rather than cultural.
00:59:07.920 | They decided to watch girls in Chicago playing dodgeball, first girls against girls, then
00:59:13.360 | girls and boys together.
00:59:15.320 | Then they did the same thing with Native American children on a Hopi reservation in Arizona.
00:59:20.280 | When Chicago girls played against other Chicago girls, there was lots of variation in the
00:59:24.800 | style and quality of play.
00:59:27.200 | Some of the girls were really serious about the game.
00:59:29.680 | As soon as play began, those girls would adopt what coaches call the "athletic stance"
00:59:34.200 | – knees bent, arms flexed, eyes focused, ready to jump for the ball.
00:59:39.160 | When play got underway, these girls were real competitors.
00:59:42.160 | They would jump for the ball, grab it, sometimes even wrestling the ball away from another
00:59:46.040 | girl.
00:59:47.040 | The girls who were most engaged were, not surprisingly, the highest skilled girls at
00:59:51.360 | playing the game.
00:59:53.120 | Other girls were not particularly excited about the game, and certainly were not jumping
00:59:56.760 | and grabbing for the ball.
00:59:58.120 | Again, not surprisingly, these girls were less skilled.
01:00:01.840 | Weisfeld and colleagues found the same variation in engagement and skill among the Native American
01:00:06.280 | girls in Arizona.
01:00:08.400 | When boys were brought into the gym, so that there were an equal number of girls and boys
01:00:12.360 | playing, the picture changed dramatically.
01:00:15.960 | The Hopi girls still participated in the game, but the high-skilled girls no longer demonstrated
01:00:21.160 | their skill.
01:00:22.560 | They didn't want to fight the boys for the ball.
01:00:24.800 | When the boys were playing, the high-skilled Hopi girls looked very much like the low-skilled
01:00:28.480 | girls.
01:00:29.720 | Most of the high-skilled Chicago girls didn't even hang around for the game when boys were
01:00:33.880 | playing.
01:00:34.880 | Instead, they left the playing area altogether and went off in little groups to dance with
01:00:39.000 | one another or to snack on potato chips.
01:00:41.960 | Most of these kids, girls and boys, were 12 years old.
01:00:45.460 | In this study, the average girl in Chicago and in Arizona was bigger and taller than
01:00:50.920 | the average boy in Chicago and in Arizona, respectively.
01:00:55.200 | Which is not surprising because 12-year-old girls are often bigger and taller than 12-year-old
01:00:59.840 | boys.
01:01:00.840 | Nevertheless, the high-skilled girls seemed to lose much of their enthusiasm for the game
01:01:06.720 | when boys came on the court.
01:01:08.960 | In a peculiar twist, the investigators, who had previously rated the skill of each girl
01:01:14.440 | and each boy in single-sex competition, arranged a game in which high-skilled girls played
01:01:19.800 | against low-skilled boys.
01:01:22.160 | The girls didn't do well.
01:01:23.920 | They didn't try hard.
01:01:25.680 | Only one Chicago girl and only one Hopi girl seemed to be comfortable fighting the boys
01:01:29.820 | for the ball.
01:01:31.560 | This study illustrates what psychologists call "group contrast effects."
01:01:37.100 | When members of two different groups are present, members of each group tend to exaggerate the
01:01:41.440 | differences between the two groups.
01:01:43.840 | Boys and girls categorize themselves as "boys" and "girls," respectively, and will be
01:01:48.600 | more likely to behave according to the prevailing cultural stereotype.
01:01:52.320 | When girls are around, boys are less willing to exhibit any behavior that might be considered
01:01:56.800 | feminine.
01:01:58.040 | When boys are around, girls are reluctant to exhibit behaviors that might be considered
01:02:02.720 | "boyish."
01:02:03.720 | I've seen this phenomenon myself while visiting co-ed schools and single-sex schools with
01:02:08.320 | regard to displays of affection for the teacher, for example.
01:02:11.960 | At co-ed elementary and middle schools, it's common to find girls giving the teacher hugs.
01:02:16.560 | But you won't find many boys hugging the teacher.
01:02:19.160 | At co-ed schools, hugging the teacher is something girls do.
01:02:23.020 | But if that school adopts the single-sex format, with boys in all-boys classrooms, all of a
01:02:28.480 | sudden you'll find boys hugging the teacher as though it's the most natural thing in the
01:02:32.000 | world for a boy to do, which, of course, it is, as long as there aren't any girls around.
01:02:37.640 | Likewise, in the study of Hopi girls and Chicago girls, if grabbing the ball out of somebody
01:02:42.700 | else's hands is perceived as something boys do, then girls will be less likely to do that
01:02:47.500 | if boys are present.
01:02:49.180 | When the girls are by themselves, you see a wider range of individual differences, from
01:02:53.560 | the competitive athlete to the disengaged girl.
01:02:56.360 | When boys are added into the mix, group contrast effects kick in, and many of the girls act
01:03:01.020 | more "girly," less competitive, more talkative.
01:03:04.420 | The co-ed format, especially in sports, has the effect of homogenizing the girls.
01:03:11.060 | Variations among the girls diminish, and differences between the sexes are exaggerated.
01:03:16.920 | And here's what I found strangest of all about the Chicago, Arizona study.
01:03:21.160 | When the investigators asked the girls which format they preferred, all-girls or co-ed,
01:03:27.640 | the girls in both locations overwhelmingly said that they preferred the co-ed format,
01:03:32.800 | even though the video showed clearly that the girls were less engaged and did much less
01:03:37.140 | well when the boys were playing.
01:03:39.240 | That's important.
01:03:41.160 | Asking girls which format they prefer isn't a reliable indicator of which format is actually
01:03:47.620 | best for them in terms of athletic engagement.
01:03:52.000 | What girls say they prefer may not always be what is best for them.
01:03:56.320 | Nowadays, it wouldn't be cool for most girls to say, "No, I would prefer to do my physical
01:04:00.860 | exercise just with other girls, no boys."
01:04:03.820 | Such a comment might make a girl vulnerable to the charge of being, God forbid, a prude.
01:04:10.640 | But there's good reason to believe that for most girls, particularly after the onset of
01:04:15.200 | puberty, the all-girls format is usually preferable for physical activity.
01:04:21.220 | Part of this has to do with the "swimsuit becomes you" phenomenon we considered in
01:04:25.520 | chapter 1.
01:04:26.520 | "When the boys are around, you can feel them looking at you," one girl said.
01:04:32.300 | Some girls might worry about how they look in the eyes of the boys.
01:04:35.780 | Other girls are simply annoyed by the way boys rate girls' bodies, as some boys do.
01:04:41.140 | There is some evidence that girls from kindergarten through high school are more likely to exercise
01:04:45.780 | when offered a single-sex gym class rather than a co-ed class.
01:04:50.200 | Before 1980, it was common for girls and boys to take their physical education classes separately,
01:04:55.160 | even if all other classes were mixed.
01:04:57.900 | Today, most co-ed schools in the United States have co-ed PE classes.
01:05:02.620 | There are many other reasons why this may not be such a good idea beyond the changes
01:05:06.620 | just discussed.
01:05:08.260 | The best way to provide instruction in physical education may be different for girls than
01:05:11.920 | it is for boys.
01:05:13.380 | For example, one strategy that is often effective for girls is to have one girl, more experienced
01:05:19.380 | in the sport, teach the sport to a novice girl.
01:05:22.840 | The more experienced girl is more likely to be sensitive to the needs of the less experienced
01:05:26.640 | girl and more interested in really helping her to learn the sport.
01:05:31.060 | Girls seem more interested in sharing their knowledge for the sake of sharing, whereas
01:05:35.060 | boys are generally more interested in showing off.
01:05:38.280 | So this strategy, pairing older kids one-on-one with younger kids, works less well for boys.
01:05:44.220 | The reasons kids play sports are often different for girls than boys.
01:05:48.020 | For many boys, the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat is what sports are all about.
01:05:53.420 | But many girls may be more interested in developing their personal capacities through sport than
01:05:57.980 | they are in establishing personal superiority over others, according to a report from researchers
01:06:04.060 | at the University of Montana.
01:06:06.320 | Many boys engage in sports because they want to win.
01:06:10.260 | The best way to get them engaged in a PE class is to have a real game with clearly defined
01:06:15.300 | winners and losers.
01:06:17.020 | Though some girls have that same competitive drive, for other girls, a win-at-all-costs
01:06:21.820 | mentality may be less appealing and may even push them away from sports.
01:06:26.920 | Girls are, on average, more likely to enjoy sports when the emphasis is on having fun
01:06:31.340 | and getting in shape rather than on beating the other team.
01:06:35.360 | You can begin to appreciate how a physical education program with girls and boys in the
01:06:40.260 | same gym class might result in zero-sum choices for the instructor.
01:06:45.340 | If you, the instructor, organize a winner-takes-all competition, then you may engage many of the
01:06:50.220 | boys, but you risk disengaging many of the girls.
01:06:53.740 | But if you structure the class along the lines of "everybody gets a trophy, everybody's
01:06:57.460 | a winner," then you may lose at least some of the boys.
01:07:01.380 | The single-sex format can broaden horizons for boys as well as for girls.
01:07:05.740 | Again, group contrast effects may be part of the explanation.
01:07:09.500 | Several years ago, I was interviewing a boy at an all-boys school in Perth, Western Australia.
01:07:13.780 | I asked him whether he saw any advantages to attending a boys' school.
01:07:18.100 | Was he doing anything at the boys' school that he wouldn't be doing at a comparable
01:07:20.900 | co-ed school?
01:07:22.220 | "Ballet," he responded without hesitation.
01:07:25.180 | This young man was the top football player at the school.
01:07:28.000 | We're talking Australian rules football, of course.
01:07:30.660 | He was tall and muscular.
01:07:32.460 | But there's no way I'd do it if the classes were mixed.
01:07:35.980 | He explained that when it's just guys in the ballet studio, and some of those guys are
01:07:39.220 | his teammates, then it's okay to work on balance and poise and fourth position.
01:07:44.340 | If girls were around, you wouldn't feel as comfortable doing a deep plie, I asked.
01:07:48.460 | He shook his head.
01:07:49.460 | "I just wouldn't be there," he said.
01:07:52.420 | By the way, just to insert, this happened to me.
01:07:55.660 | When I was in college, I tried to press myself to do different things.
01:07:58.780 | So I took a salsa dancing class, which was great, super fun.
01:08:02.840 | And I had a friend of mine who was an amazingly athletic, coordinated guy, and he was a dancer.
01:08:08.660 | He did ballet.
01:08:10.260 | And I had always judged ballet as something stupid and girly and never going to be involved.
01:08:15.380 | Then I started researching the topic of ballet, and I discovered, "Wait a second.
01:08:19.620 | This is amazingly athletic.
01:08:21.140 | And you look at male ballet dancers, they're just incredible athletes."
01:08:24.300 | And so I thought, "Well, Joshua, you want to get some exercise.
01:08:26.820 | You want to get stronger and whatnot.
01:08:31.380 | Why not?
01:08:32.380 | Let's try it out."
01:08:33.380 | So I signed up for a ballet class, and I went the first day.
01:08:36.060 | And it was a mixed ballet class, and I walked out the door.
01:08:38.580 | I never could come back, because everything about it, where I was always happy to...
01:08:43.500 | I have no problem being a total novice at something.
01:08:46.700 | I have no problem being terrible at something.
01:08:48.460 | I'm pretty good at that.
01:08:49.460 | I don't have a lot of pride associated with that stuff.
01:08:50.980 | Just get in and start learning it.
01:08:53.220 | But in a mixed class format of ballet, where you're just terrible at it as a guy, I could
01:08:59.060 | not do it.
01:09:00.060 | I couldn't do it in front of girls.
01:09:01.340 | Whereas if it had been a male-only ballet class, I probably would have done it and learned
01:09:05.220 | something and gotten flexible and learned to dance, and it would have been good for
01:09:08.820 | my overall athletic development.
01:09:10.780 | So I would concur with what that guy said.
01:09:14.580 | I have found that parents are often receptive to the idea of single-sex physical education
01:09:18.880 | for teenagers, provided that the same facilities and resources are available to the girls and
01:09:22.900 | boys.
01:09:24.140 | That willingness seems to arise in part because so many parents are concerned about the sexual
01:09:28.100 | overtones that might kick in when teenage girls and boys engage in strenuous physical
01:09:32.980 | activity in close proximity.
01:09:35.020 | Too much heavy breathing.
01:09:36.740 | But many parents balk at the idea of single-sex physical education for younger kids.
01:09:41.740 | I don't see the point of separating girls and boys for gym class in second grade, one
01:09:45.500 | parent told me.
01:09:47.100 | Seven-year-olds don't have a sexual agenda at that age, do they?
01:09:49.780 | She asked.
01:09:51.740 | Seven-year-olds hopefully do not have a sexual agenda, but they certainly do have gendered
01:09:55.700 | notions about physical activity.
01:09:58.020 | As I noted earlier, seven-year-old boys are more likely to boast about their imaginary
01:10:02.580 | physical prowess, and seven-year-old girls may believe them.
01:10:06.300 | So girls get the notion very early that the gym and the playing field are the boys'
01:10:10.300 | domain.
01:10:11.300 | An all-girls physical education program, beginning in kindergarten, might enable more girls to
01:10:15.580 | take ownership of the whole domain of physical activity.
01:10:18.780 | We need to help our daughters take that ownership, to feel comfortable on the playing field.
01:10:23.740 | By the time kids reach adolescence, boys are much more comfortable than girls on basketball
01:10:28.620 | courts, playing fields, streets, local parks, and other public spaces conducive to physical
01:10:32.620 | activity, according to researcher Dr. Candy James.
01:10:36.780 | Girls often see these places as belonging to boys, and they fear being teased, excluded,
01:10:41.060 | or hurt if they try to join in.
01:10:42.460 | Instead, they sit on the periphery as passive spectators or avoid these active spaces altogether.
01:10:49.460 | Many of the girls surveyed by Dr. James said they would use their school basketball courts
01:10:53.660 | if the courts were located where boys could not watch them.
01:10:57.780 | Work with your school to ensure that all-girls athletic options and all-girls physical education
01:11:02.820 | are available.
01:11:04.300 | But the all-girls format won't be so great if you have a male instructor screaming at
01:11:08.780 | the girls.
01:11:10.180 | We parents need to insist that the instructors who are teaching our daughters understand
01:11:14.740 | and respect gender differences in order to help each girl to fulfill her physical potential.
01:11:20.860 | In her book, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, Courtney Martin describes her own years-long
01:11:26.420 | struggle to accept her body, to move beyond her obsession with what she ate and how she
01:11:31.420 | looked.
01:11:32.540 | Her body was her enemy.
01:11:34.660 | She began to glimpse a resolution to her struggle one day while taking a yoga class.
01:11:38.940 | The instructor told her to "meet your body where it is."
01:11:43.300 | This was a new concept for her.
01:11:45.700 | Meet your body where it is.
01:11:48.540 | Be comfortable in your body.
01:11:50.700 | Work on your fitness, but be at home in your own body.
01:11:54.820 | Psychologist Madeline Levine writes that many communities overvalue a very narrow range
01:11:58.980 | of academic and extracurricular accomplishments.
01:12:02.020 | Many parents sign their daughters up for soccer or basketball without investigating whether
01:12:05.900 | those sports are really the best choice for their daughter.
01:12:09.100 | For some girls, yoga or aerobics might be a better way of connecting with their own
01:12:13.300 | bodies.
01:12:14.300 | Or maybe canoeing.
01:12:15.300 | I recall Shannon, a teenage girl from my own practice, who discovered on her own at the
01:12:19.820 | age of 13 that she had a passion for canoeing and kayaking.
01:12:23.460 | Her father asked if she wanted to join a kayaking club so that she could compete against other
01:12:27.820 | teenagers.
01:12:29.180 | She had no interest in competing.
01:12:31.360 | She didn't want to beat anybody.
01:12:33.300 | She just enjoyed the feeling of being on the river, gliding along the water on her own
01:12:37.460 | power.
01:12:39.000 | During the summer between 10th and 11th grade, Shannon spent two weeks canoeing the Snake
01:12:43.020 | River in the Yukon Territory, Canada, with a group of other girls.
01:12:47.280 | She told me later how much she valued that experience.
01:12:49.780 | "We spent all day every day either canoeing or portaging our canoe.
01:12:54.100 | By the time it was evening and time to make camp, I was so hungry.
01:12:57.960 | You can't believe how good fresh river trout tastes after you've spent six hours canoeing
01:13:02.580 | and two hours portaging your canoe and your gear."
01:13:06.180 | Then after a pause, she said, "It's the most spiritual thing I've ever done.
01:13:11.040 | Out there in the wilderness, on the river, where there's no trace of anything human,
01:13:15.780 | it's so easy to believe in something more.
01:13:18.420 | Paddling on the river became a kind of prayer for me, you know?"
01:13:21.980 | I nodded, because that's what doctors do, but I wasn't sure I understood.
01:13:27.100 | "The physical becomes spiritual," Shannon said, and then shook her head as though she
01:13:33.520 | had said something wrong, or as though she were on the brink of tears.
01:13:39.460 | And thus concludes chapter six of the book Girls on the Edge by Dr. Leonard Sachs.
01:13:43.320 | I would commend it to you.
01:13:44.940 | It's a great book.
01:13:46.420 | His book, Boys Adrift, was one that a listener begged me to read, sent me multiple emails
01:13:50.820 | until I finally acquiesced, and then I went ahead and found it so good that I followed
01:13:54.260 | on with Girls on the Edge.
01:13:56.020 | There are other, I'm sure, other books, and I'm sure there's controversy about all that
01:13:59.620 | stuff that he said.
01:14:00.620 | Who knows?
01:14:01.620 | The point is, recognize that your girls need to develop their bodies, just like boys need
01:14:11.600 | to develop their height.
01:14:14.300 | And if you are able to raise daughters who are strong, who are athletic, who are comfortable
01:14:20.520 | in their bodies, and who have strong athletic bodies themselves, that confidence will probably
01:14:27.420 | have a similar effect to the confidence that boys come with height.
01:14:32.700 | Now, I can't prove any of that.
01:14:34.660 | And we go back to the question of, are people, tall people, do they make more money because
01:14:39.820 | of heightism and kind of a social perception, or is it a cognitive thing?
01:14:45.020 | Again, the researchers, some of them claim that height is indicative of cognitive development,
01:14:50.180 | so probably it's that tall people are slightly smarter than people who are not tall.
01:14:53.180 | I don't know.
01:14:54.540 | All I know is that all of us are attracted to strong and confident women.
01:15:00.360 | And so if we want our daughters to become strong and confident women, then we need to
01:15:04.940 | think about the environment that they're raised in and think about how do we nurture strength
01:15:09.620 | and confidence?
01:15:11.260 | It's not the only thing.
01:15:12.260 | There are many other things, everything from social abilities and character qualities and
01:15:15.660 | physical appearance and kindness and all kinds of other factors, but we need to give careful
01:15:20.760 | attention to it.
01:15:21.760 | So I didn't want to just ignore the girls in that particular episode.
01:15:26.020 | I want you to know that we need to make certain of physical development for both our boys
01:15:30.900 | and our girls, but that we need to be certain that we don't let our androgynous culture
01:15:36.500 | that claims that there's no differences between boys and girls keep us from doing what's right.
01:15:41.420 | Undoubtedly, if you take this message and go to your local institutions, unless your
01:15:45.540 | institutions are enlightened, undoubtedly, you're going to immediately get in the thick
01:15:49.740 | of the swamp with, "We can't treat boys different from girls.
01:15:52.540 | We can't treat girls different from boys."
01:15:55.240 | Don't let it...
01:15:56.240 | Again, I described earlier, if my Christian homeschool co-op isn't, if the moms in there
01:16:02.140 | are not willing to consider having boys-only classes or girls-only classes, not even willing
01:16:06.860 | to consider it, then you're probably going to face similar levels of resistance, no matter
01:16:12.860 | in your institution.
01:16:14.620 | But that doesn't matter.
01:16:15.900 | What matters is, is it true or is it not true?
01:16:18.660 | And then if it's true, then for the sake of those we love, you and I have a responsibility
01:16:25.500 | to press in, fulfill our responsibilities as leaders of society, and do what is in the
01:16:30.300 | best interest of our children, regardless of whether it's popular or not.
01:16:33.900 | So, I hope these ideas have helped you, and I hope that you have a great day.
01:16:36.700 | I'll be back with you soon.
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