Winning the parenting Olympics

This week at "In the Parenthood," I'm musing about how parenting could (or maybe should) be an Olympic sport. Here's an excerpt from the column, which is in today's Boston Globe:

Like most people, I was glued to the Olympics for days. And while watching world records fall and medal counts rise, I thought that parenting should qualify as an Olympic sport.

It’s definitely an endurance challenge - much more so than cross-country skiing in the most adverse winter conditions. As your kids get older, you encounter more obstacles than a competitor on a slalom course. If you have a partner, you have to work on coordinating your routine perfectly, and if you don’t, you’re skating every part of every routine by yourself. ... [More]

Read the rest at Boston.com. And, for the record, my parents are currently gunning for gold in the Adult Child Division of the competition: Now that all three of their kids are parents and the whole "I hope you grow up and have a child who's just like you" thing has come true, we -- or, at least, I -- call every so often to apologize for anything I said or did during high school.