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<p>To play in the WNBA, players have to either have their degree or be 22 (meaning that their class is probably graduating anyway) unless they’re foreign and came from a whole different system with different rules. That rule (obviously) doesn’t exist for NBA, NHL, NFL – and does result in more of those players actually having degrees.</p>
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<p>That’s a tough call. But the whole issue of sharing parental resources among siblings doesn’t only come up in the funding dreams scenario. I’ve got a relative with a child (adopted) who has numerous behavioral disorders. Helping that child requires enormous amounts of time from the parents. The other siblings resent it, and they probably suffer. They’re in family therapy to try and figure out a way to work out conflicts and resentments. Granted this family didn’t make a choice–they didn’t have control over what happened to their child, while the family who choses to support one kid’s dreams/passions does. But doesn’t every family with more than one child have to deal with this issue on some level.</p>
<p>WMBA what a joke tell your daughter to get a real job.</p>
<p>It is always a challenge to share family/parental resources, especially when they are scarce and need outstrips supply. In our family, we have spent more than we’d like on medical expenses, for me & our kids. Fortunately, we were able to do it and still do the other things we wanted to do, but I can definitely see how it could be a BIG problem if resources were tighter than ours were, especially since it involved flying to doctors thousands of miles from our home for evaluations.</p>
<p>I know one of D’s friends resents that her dad was injured and can no longer be the breadwinner & provide for the family (or even independently care for himself). No one else in the family was or is prepared to pick up the yoke & finance the expensive lifestyle and it is a very challenging time for all of them to figure out their path going forward. She just finished college & has two younger brothers. She was planning on med school but just was hired as a lab assistant at Harvard.</p>
<p>Never heard of the “WMBA”, Dr.</p>
<p>Maybe that’s why it’s not a real job. :)</p>
<p>Sorry I meant WNBA I was laughing too hard</p>
<p>Jonri: That figure of $10,000 for a pair of ice skates (even for a pro) simply doesn’t make sense. Several sources say around $600 to $1000 or so. Custom costumes, around $1000. By googling, I found several skater-mom blogs that say they try to keep expenses around $1000/month, including coaching. It’s quite possible expenses go up considerably when a skater goes from national to international competition, but at that point sponsorship possibilities should start. </p>
<p>Yes, $1000/month is expensive, but I certainly know many adults who spend about that much on their recreational sports or hobbies, especially when you count travel, entry fees, and equipment.</p>
<p>Bromfield makes a good point that the allocation of family resources is rarely completely equal or fair anyway. Besides, the concept of “fair” is tricky, and probably shouldn’t be used for things like illnesses and disabilities. That said, though, there are children whose disabilities are so severe that no amount of money will help with the cure, and yet some parents keep spending inordinate sums on every quacky new treatment under the sun (eg. traveling to see shamans in Africa) to the detriment of their other kids.</p>
<p>Birth order comes into play also. We had less money to spend on our first born, the second born got the most financial advantage as far as spending for EC’s, and now we’re strapped again for our third due to paying college for the older two. Some friends of ours were able to spend a lot on their eldest, but after the economic downturn and a job loss, have little for their younger ones’ activities.</p>
<p>re: ice skates</p>
<p>I do remember it as being something like $10,000 a pair. It was a long time ago, and I may not remember the correct cost of the ice skates…or it could be that the cost of skates has come down. I don’t know. </p>
<p>In any event, I know it was a lot more than the prom shoes.</p>
<p>PS: My googling skills have not yet gotten a hit, but I did find an article that says the cost of Dorothy Hammill’s last year of training for the 1976 Olympics was $20,000. I’ll keep looking.</p>
<p>I can answer the cost of skates question. Semi-custom figure skates for an elite level skater run about $1500.00 a pair–roughly $1000.00 for the boots and $500.00 for the blades. A pair should last a year, although some skaters I know will go through two pairs in a year.</p>
<p>The one thing about the Gabby Douglas story is that she went far away to train with a new coach. Chow always seems like he’s super-nice, but how do you ever know for sure? I wonder if Gabby’s mom taked to Shawn Johnson’s mom about him.</p>
<p>Whenever a kid trains at the elite level, she is spending a LOT of time with an adult not her parent. I guess a parent has to trust the child to say something if some kind of abuse is going on.</p>
<p>Our gymnast D is the least “like us” of our three children. I always say she was raised by wolves. She spent so many hours at the gym with the coaches and other gymnasts. Her humor and language are a bit more coarse than the rest of us…nothing terrible but I do credit the gym’s influence. I also know that when she chose a cheer gym, she chose the gym with the nice coaches that had teams that weren’t quite as good as the gym with the mean coaches. (Don’t want to paint with a broad brush, but no more Romanian coaches for her!)</p>
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<p>I drove a group of elite-level rhythmic coaches to the airport following a competition. In rhythmics, the elite coaches are Russian and Bulgarian–two groups that dominate the sport internationally. These coaches were having an argument about the best way to motivate kids. Most felt that you needed to be tough (which in this case meant screaming at the girls). A few coaches thought positive reinforcement was better, but most thought one never got results with positive reinforcement. My D had a screaming coach (also one who consistently had the most kids on the national team). D learned to develop a tough skin–probably the most important thing she learned from years of training and competition. There’s no way I could have dealt with a coach like that–I had parents who were screamers.</p>
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You had much nicer music teachers than my kids ever had! A lot of our teachers really wanted to be teaching future Julliard students. At least one basically fired my kid. :)</p>
<p>My kids are not athletic or musical, but my oldest was precocious in a couple of fields before he found his real love and it was always an interesting dance of how much to encourage and how much to push and how much we got pulled into his activities. He played competitive chess pretty seriously for a while, and even went to a chess camp for a week or two with the Dad/coach of the soon-to-be youngest chess grandmaster in the US. At some point though our kid realized that to get to the next level he’d actually have to memorize a lot of chess patterns, and he just wasn’t that interested. (And by then he’d discovered programming.) </p>
<p>A really good read about these issues is Searching for Bobby Fisher. Fred Waitzkin writes about his son who was a chess prodigy. (He no longer plays competitive chess, though he became an International Master at 16.)</p>
<p>And when it became clear that computer programming was what really interested my son, we made sure he got lots of opportunities to explore that interest. He had dozens of manuals about programming languages starting with Visual Basic for Dummies I think. He spent a happy week at computer camp one year, and took a summer school course at Columbia another year. We arranged for him to job shadow someone in the field which led to employment in high school. We were lucky that for him his dream/passion also made him highly employable, but that had never been the reason for encouraging him.</p>
<p>At a party recently and the hostess pointed to one of the children, an 11-yo girl, and said “She’s just like Gabby D. She’s amazing. She’s headed for the Olympics. Have you seen her do X?” Things like that always grate to me, as this woman is in no way an expert on gymnastics. It’s just another example of the kind of pressure some kids might find themselves under.</p>
<p>ETA: I know nothing about gymnastics either, and wouldn’t speculate as to whether the girl is amazing or not.</p>
<p>If I’d read the whole thread I’d have seen that musicamusica already recommended *Searching for Bobby Fischer <a href=“I’m%20spelling%20it%20correctly%20this%20time!”>/I</a> The movie is lots of fun, but the book is even more interesting I think. The Dad comes off as both crazier and more introspective.</p>
<p>Honestly you should push academics not athletics for your daughters. However their are exceptions to people who are athletically gifted at birth. No trying to disrespect anyone but women in professional sports is not a good source of income.</p>
<p>Nobody should count on a career in professional sports. Male or female, I think they have to have a certain level of talent and such to be able to make it that way, and it’s never a reliable career path. The best football player could have a career ending injury just before the draft and never make anything. Which is part of missypie’s point in the original post, I think – at which point is it worth it? I know somebody who has been training full time with the national team in her sport for two years – not a sport that anybody, male or female, makes money off of – and she was one of the last cuts before the Olympics. </p>
<p>That said, DrDavid, do you actually know what WNBA players make? No, they’re not raking it in like NBA players (but I don’t think NBA players should make as much as they do) but they make a decent salary. The rookie minimum salary is more than I make working in my field two years after graduation. And the Diana Taurasi’s and Candace Parker’s of the league do really well for themselves. It is a sport where women do actually have an opportunity to support themselves, and WNBA players also are much more likely than NBA players to actually have a college degree and be prepared to transition into a different career when their playing days end.</p>
<p>We love the Olympics. My DH, a learned gentleman, goes bananas every Olympics season, become fiercely nationalistic and passionate about obscure sports and the medal count. </p>
<p>That said, I watch the fun, I thrill to the amazing exploits, I cheer my favorites. But a little voice in the back of my head keeps asking . . . what on Earth does someone running super fast or swimming super fast or dancing around on a narrow beam really do that is of any real use to this world?? I mean really.</p>
<p>This is probably why my kids – who were actually fairly talented at sports weren’t serious about sports. I think sports are fundamentally extremely stupid. Fitness is one thing. I’m all for fitness, health, strength. But competitive sports seem completely idiotic to me. Always have.</p>
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sewhappy, you say you are for fitness health and strength. What do your kids do for that?
The kids I know are either athletic and participate in some sport, or they do nothing. The latter may be of average body weight, but by no means are they “fit.”</p>