Little League dads brawl in Georgia, and other bad parenting examples

Lisa Belkin is the Senior columnist for Life/Work/ Family at The Huffington Post.

Our take: Parents sometimes get overly involved in their children's lives, even to the point of throwing punches at little league baseball games. The excessive pressure from parents about high performance can drive children to drastic measures, like cheating on exams to make high enough scores to get into Ivy League schools. In this blog post, Lisa Belkin discusses these pressures and how parents need to not focus on performance as the main indicator of success in life.

I watched the video of fathers brawling at a Georgia Little League game -- including the part where two Dads were taken off in handcuffs and charged with disorderly conduct --

No, there were no parents throwing punches during the scandalous incident at Manhattan's Stuyvesant High School, which is among the most prestigious public schools in the country. Technically there were no parents directly involved when 70 students exchanged text messages with answers during a state Regents exam. But there might as well have been.

The message sent to the 12-year-olds on the field at Britt David Park in Columbus was that winning matters so much it is worth fighting over. I'm betting that is the same message that the 16-year-old Stuyvesant students were sent over the years.

Read more about parental influences on winning and cheating on The Huffington Post.