Mom’s goodbye to youth football
‘‘There is never a good enough reason to hit a child in the head 500 times for a sport.” The brutal honesty in Chris Nowinski’s words slapped me across the face. A Harvard-educated former pro-wrestler with a Ph.D. in behavioral neuroscience, Nowinski is the founder of Concussion Legacy Foundation and one of the leading voices on post-concussion syndrome and chronic traumatic encephalopathy in football players.
On this night, Nowinski was a guest on my sports radio talk show in Chicago, and what had begun as a conversation about the latest research in CTE in NFL players had quickly morphed into a discussion of the drawbacks of youth football. As a mother of two sons, both of whom played youth football, this a touchy subject for me. And as the phone lines lit up with parents who wanted to defend their child’s team, league, coaches, it was clear I wasn’t alone.
For the last several years of my son’s travel football career, parents were reassured by various leagues and coaches that safety was their paramount concern. First came the presence of “concussion spotters” on the sidelines. Each child was required to have a baseline cognition test before the season started. Any kid who looked woozy after a hit was immediately pulled from the game and checked by a trainer, and often sent to the emergency room, because better safe than sorry.
Then came the new “anti-concussion” helmets. For $299, parents could protect their children from hard hits to the head. How could we say no to that? Finally, the safety program Heads Up Football became all the rage.
As parents, we didn’t ask many questions. We ate it all up, desperate to believe that special helmets, more trainers and better tackling techniques would keep our children safe. We wanted someone, anyone, to tell us it was OK for our 6-year-olds to play tackle football.
And yet, Nowinski said, there is nothing that can keep a child safe from repeated sub-concussive blows.
“There isn’t evidence that [Heads Up Football] works or that it helps,” he said, adding that the program was exposed by The New York Times for fraudulently asserting that it lowered the risk of concussion when, in fact, it didn’t.
And the special helmets that were supposed to protect our children’s developing brains? Nowinski compared them to filters on cigarettes. “There’s only so much a helmet can do for you.”
As for all those trainers and concussion specialists roaming the sidelines? Nowinski said there’s no reason to think they’ll help reduce the number of adults who wind up with CTE, pointing out that 1 in 5 former players diagnosed with CTE never had a diagnosed concussion. It’s not the concussions that cause CTE, but thousands of blows that don’t result in concussions.
Luckily, both my sons stopped playing football of their own accord. I didn’t have to make the choice for them, didn’t have to be the bad guy keeping them from their friends and their favorite sport. I do, however, know lots of parents who refuse to make that very difficult decision for their children. Their justifications: “All his friends play.” “My husband played through college, and he’s never had any problems.” “The league requires all the coaches to go through concussion training.”
“Nobody wants to ever believe that they’ve done wrong by their child,” Nowinski said. “The problem with football is that it becomes your social club; once you start, it’s hard to pull out.”
Is it ever. Even though both my sons have moved on to other sports, there’s been nothing to replace the camaraderie of youth football. Maybe it’s those crisp fall mornings. Maybe it’s just the American love affair with football.
Each Saturday, we had with parents we genuinely felt close to and kids we adored at our youth football games.
It’s understandable that parents are reluctant to give it up. The alternative, though, is to unnecessarily subject a child with a developing brain to repeated hits to the head. As the evidence of CTE as a cumulative disease continues to mount, it’s a decision parents need to take seriously.
A 2016 study in the Journal of Neurotrauma found that the total number of hits to the head in youth and high school football was more dispositive of a CTE diagnosis later in life than were concussions. For this reason, Nowinski encourages parents to enroll their kids in flag football leagues until high school.
“Sports are great,” he said, “but … no sports for children should have repetitive brain trauma.”
I think back often on some of the hits my son, a fearless safety, put on other children, and my stomach roils. He doled out more than one concussion before he even hit junior high, something our family used to joke about. Now, as study after study ties repetitive hits to the head to CTE, I’m horrified by the cavalier way I celebrated while my child’s brain bounced around inside his $299 helmet.
“How can I tell him he’s not allowed to play football?” one mother asked me of her 9-year old son, incredulous at that thought. Knowing what we now know about youth football, how can she not?