Should Sports Be Revised to Keep Young Children Safer?

Emergency room visits for sports-related brain injuries has risen by 60% over the last ten years.   Should contact sports for children under fourteen be motified to stop this growing trend?   Is this spike directly associated with the fact that children seem to be playing contact sports at younger ages than ever before? There is growing support for these changes because young brains under the age of fourteen are more vulnerable due to neck weakness.  The proposed changes will effect the nature of many sports, but the three "biggies" will incur changes that will change these games significantly if they are adopted.  Here are the proposed changes for children under fourteen:

Football-eliminate tackling, adopt flag football, use tackle dummies to teach tackling
Soccer-no heading as most of the head injuries in soccer are linked to this practice
Hockey-no full body checking
Field Hockey & LaCrosse-use helmets,  most of the injuries are due to being hit with the sticks

I don't think many parents would argue that the use of helmets in LaCrosse and Field Hockey is something that they couldn't live with in order to keep their child safer while playing.  However, I think that this group is going to come up against some significant resistance from parents whose children participate in the "big three".  I think some parents will argue that these changes are going to change the nature of these games too much and their children will not be prepared to play theonce they reach fourteen.  Parents argueing for these changes not only make the point about safety but also the effect these injuries have on the health care system.

The debate begins.  Will child safety win out over sports or will sports be the victor?  Only time will tell.  I think that there are going to be some very heated debates between parents on both sides of this issue before any decision is finalized. 

Afterschool Activities

When considering activities for your child, it is important consider that we all want to raise balanced children. In order to raise a balanced child, they need to have lived a balanced life. My recommendation is to limit your child’s after school activities to no more than two or three days a week. I believe that this will leave your child enough time to just be a kid, while they are still a kid and can enjoy that. Children learn many of their life lessons through their play, so it is imperative that you give them time to play. In addition to these valuable lessons, there will be many opportunities to have teachable moments with your child about winning and losing, and success and failures. What better way to prepare them for what lies ahead of them in the "real" world.


If your child is extremely talented at a sport and you think that they are headed to the Olympics or to a professional career, that may require a much larger commitment. Be sure that your expectation of athletic greatness is based in reality, before making this kind of commitment with your child. It will be a commitment for both of you and statistically this level of athlete comes along very infrequently.

After school activities are extremely important for your child to participate in. It teaches practical lessons in areas that talking to your children alone can not begin to teach. It helps them to develop a sense of good sportsmanship, builds confidence, teaches responsibility and teamwork, all for the price of one or two nights a week. Finding the right activity or activities for your child may take some time, and I know it did with my own children. Each tried soccer, t-ball, scouts, gymnastics before they both settled on karate. We insisted that they stuck with an activity for an entire season, for two reasons. First, we wanted them to make sure whether this was the right activity for them and that takes more than one or two days to make that type of decision. Secondly, we wanted to be sure to instill in our children that when you commit to something, people count on you to follow through and it wouldn’t b right to quit halfway through, leaving your teammates in a lurch.

My parting word of wisdom on the topic of after school activities has to be BALANCE. Without a balanced life, we raise “lop-sided” children.