American football is an inherently unsafe sport. Given the evidence, any parent letting their child play it is making a mistake, IMO.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/aaron-hernandez-suffered-from-most-severe-cte-ever-found-in-a-person-his-age/2017/11/09/fa7cd204-c57b-11e7-afe9-4f60b5a6c4a0_story.html?tid=hybrid_collaborative_3_na-amp&utm_term=.9d2b74f10e2a
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LEGO Americana Roadshow: Building Across America I just checked out this traveling exhibition from LEGO and was quite impressed. The scale ... -
Merry Christmas, everyone!
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When we let politics trump science, people are needlessly put in harm's way. http://arstechnica.com/science/2017/01/self-censoring-fears...
Nikki Biefel works with child head injury patients. It's not just American football: headers in futbol bring a lot of kids to her as well.
ReplyDeleteWhere do you draw the line.
ReplyDeleteAl Middleton, just outside the football bleachers. Maybe the parking lot.
ReplyDeleteWe had three rules about sports:
ReplyDelete1. One at a time.
B. School work comes first. You have to keep your grades up.
III. No football
Lots of things we do are inherently unsafe. Driving is inherently unsafe. It's a matter of taking whatever safety precautions you can and then weighing out the benefits versus the potential consequences. Without teaching a child to accept some risk in life, you'll end up with an agoraphobic.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I would leave it up to circumstances with the individual child. If you have a kid that is not academically inclined and can't have their attention kept by anything that isn't physical, letting them play football has fewer risks associated to it than many other things they could potentially get themselves involved in otherwise. Even if they are academic, the physical activity involved in playing football will likely give them a net benefit in health compared to the potential of sitting sedentary, injury risks included.
Are there other physical activities that might be safer? Sure, but if they don't grab the kid's interest, then they aren't going to do any good.
Brad D funny you should mention driving. We gave up car ownership a decade ago. We walk and take trains and buses. We buy less, and sometimes spend a little more in small shops, but no longer pay the $5k/Year fixed cost of car ownership, so we come out ahead. We're safer for it, too.
ReplyDeleteThere’s unsafe because things can go wrong, and there’s unsafe when done as directed. We used to think football was the first. We now know that it’s the second.
ReplyDeleteKee Hinckley Precisely. Driving a car isn't inherently unsafe. Most drivers drive their whole lives and are never injured at all, let alone significantly, as a result of driving. Football, OTOH, requires the participants to subject themselves to regular and repeated injury. That we can't see it lets us believe that it doesn't happen to every player. Studies are starting to mount up showing that it actually does.
ReplyDeleteTraumatic brain injury is also somewhat cumulative and additive: once you get one, your chances of another are higher and the damage from it is higher. I'm not sure there's any evidence that the same holds for automobile accidents.
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