Many are opting out. Participation in youth tackle football has been declining for years. But especially in communities of color, tackle football’s lure remains strong and the balance tips toward opportunity, a four-month investigation by The Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism and the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland has found.
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Last year, the Boston University CTE Center released a study that said the developing brains of children are at risk for damage from repeated impacts to the head and brain that have been associated with impulsive behaviors and cognitive problems.
The study notes that children who start playing tackle football at an early age or participate in the sport for more than 11 years run an increased risk of such impairment.
Anyone ever thought that it’s because they think it’s fun?
I remember in elementary school we played tackle football on the concrete when the teachers weren’t looking. Even in middle school students would play tackle football (though we upgraded to a grass field). It wasn’t really until highschool that we stopped and even then it was only because we didn’t have recess outside of sitting in the lunchroom after eating.
We also didn’t even have pads or helmets. You just took the damage and walked it off. I even gave myself a concussion playing keep away by sliding through a kids legs and slamming my head off the ground (it was cold and the ground was hard.)
Obviously this is all anecdotal but seems like an easy question to answer. They play because they’re having fun.
“Walk it off” has literally killed kids
Kids shouldn’t be pushed into sports because they’ll pick up toxic and dangerous attitudes like “walk it off”
I cannot disagree more. Playing sports in my youth and adult life has led me to living an infinitely healthier life long-term and I’ve made a lot of my friends through sports even in my adult life.
While I’m not going to force my kids to do a sport they don’t like we will keep trying different sports until we find something they enjoy.
Sure kids probably shouldn’t be playing football, but to say they shouldn’t play any contact sport as a whole is utterly insane.
Kids need to play a team sport when they’re young. I’m not a football fan, but beyond that I don’t much care which team sport…
But the lessons learned in working together towards a common goal, even with teammates you don’t necessarily like
…… It’s an invaluable lesson.
I don’t really see it. You can teach teamwork a hundred ways
Like?
Ok, it’s fun. It can also give you a concussion.
Not that I think you do, but do you think it’s ok for kids now to play tackle football the way you did growing up?
I mean kinda. I definitely wouldn’t be okay with them doing it on concrete (so much road rash) but we also didn’t try to hit each other full force. We weren’t slamming into each other at full speed. We’d go for the legs or the waist and drag them to the ground in lieu of ramming our skulls together.
We were being careful while also not? Like we knew it was dangerous (there’s a reason you wear helmets and pads in the real deal) but we took steps to limit those dangers.
So as long as everyone involved is willing to not go full speed and recognize the dangers of doing so (we had a couple kids who weren’t allowed to play because they didn’t) I don’t really see a problem. Especially when it keeps them active and teaches them about their bodies and limitations.
Also it was one of the only times the other kids would really include me in anything so that’s probably why I enjoyed it so much.
I had a similar childhood, and I understand that kids want to do things that are fun, but now we are the adults and it is our responsibility to make things safe at the cost of some fun. Remember how we didn’t like grown-ups with their tyrannical authoritarian rules? Well now we’re the grown-ups, and now we are privy to info that kids don’t have, and it turns out that those grown-ups had reasons for not letting us do certain things, and now it’s our duty to be the stick-in-the-mud fuddy-duddy who stops unnecessary brain damage. Not only that, but there’s just generally more scientific evidence showing that this shit is way worse for kids than we ever realized. I have yet to see a study come out saying “football is actually not that bad for kids or their brains” and we will never see a study that says “playing football is better overall for kids than not playing football.”
If we latch onto our childhood nostalgia, we’ll find ourselves no better than dumbass boomers who glorify their “good ol’ days” that were actually objectively pretty shitty for most people. Let’s change with the times as we learn and understand things so we can pivot to gracefully accept improvements even if they’re scary and new. Let’s break the cycle. Let’s not fail these kids the way our parents failed us.
A lot of kids get put in sports aginst their will to satesfy their parents desires or for resume building
I mean obviously the real answer is a little of column A and a little of column B. My parents tried to keep me out of contact sports as long as they could, but I was drawn to them like it was destiny. I eventually traded every single non-contact sport with the contact variety during that season (football, wrestling, and rugby).
That being said, there were also kids who stopped playing contact sports as they got older, for one reason or another. Would some of them have played when they were younger if their parents hadn’t signed them up? Probably not.
The main point the article is trying to make is more nuanced than “why do kids play contact sports?” They’re really asking “why do minority kids play football at a higher rate than white kids?” They’re suggesting the answer is that since minorities in the US are disproportionately poor, they’re more likely to hope, whether consciously or not, that their kid will make it big in sports.
When I was a kid, there were these giant piles of dirt and gravel leftover from a construction project at the middle school. We would ride our bikes up and down the dirt piles and make mud bombs to throw at each other. It was really fun.
There were also rusty nails and broken glass mixed in, and several kids broke bones falling off their bikes on those piles.
And when it rained, the storm drain would back up and make a muddy pond where we could jump in and splash around.
The point is, being fun is not a good enough reason to do something unsafe.
I coach junior rugby in NZ.
The first thing we teach is the correct way to tackle so you protect your head, followed closely by how you protect their neck. Also now have a standing rule that if a kid goes down holding their head, they are off, and I have called games early if we feel it isn’t safe to continue with the number and technique being displayed.
We also don’t have pads - and a different definition of a tackle.
Kids get hurt playing everything, and we can’t just stop them having fun because we are worried. Put kids in a trampoline and they will be tackling eachother in minutes. Teach them safety, minimize the risks, let them throw themselves around.
Yeah, ironically the unbelievable 92% of players who have brain injuries are partially a result of the protective gear.
“I got a concussion as a child, why shouldn’t my children get the same concussions?”
Concussions and subconsussive hits causing CTE are implicated in violent crime. Fewer of both in kids will lower crime more than the police