by Matthew Sitman
Marjorie Ingall reviews Joshua Berkowitz's memoir of coaching the Rashi Rams, his son's Jewish day school's baseball team:
“There’s a pace to baseball that lends itself to thoughtfulness,” said Joshua Berkowitz, author of the new book Third Base for Life: A Memoir of Fathers, Sons, and Baseball. “People who love baseball are able to sit back and observe; they’re not constantly looking for the next great action. Baseball is history and literature; football is more like a video game. There’s such beauty to the game, with the the field and the grass and the greens.”
She believes the book is especially instructive for today's control-obsessed parents:
Every parent should internalize the book’s message that risk is its own reward. If you never let your kid fail because you’re terrified of destroying his confidence, you’re going to fail in your own job of raising a self-reliant, resilient kid. Berkowitz, a doctor of internal medicine on the North Shore of Boston, told me: “I’m not a psychologist, but my everyday observation is that parents today live through and for their children more than older generations did. It’s hard for them to let kids live their lives. People are afraid to let their kids’ feelings be hurt, which leads to every kid getting a trophy and no one ever losing, and that means we’re doing more harm than good to our kids. We make it hard for them to learn the skills they need to succeed in the world, to bounce back when they’re knocked down. If you constantly shield them from falling they’ll never learn to get back up.”
The Dish 