Sobering Week for Football Parents

There are moments in a parent’s life when a particular issue arises that is so unexpected, so surprising that it makes all of us question how we are raising our children. Are we making a big mistake?

Please watch Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s special this Sunday on CNN. Dr. Gupta is well known neurosurgeon and professor at Emory University School of Medicine as well as a administrator of neurosurgery at Grady Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. He will discuss recent and ongoing research about concussions and SUB-concussion injuries in football. We have engineered equipment that allows performance to exceed the limits of the body tolerance; well beyond common sense. The equipment has changed the intent of games; the moral rules of how we win, how we play and the values of sports entertainment.

Due to the new information this is not a subject that will likely fade into the news cycle. Many journalists (including my story in early December) have focused attention on the undiagnosed occurrence of brain injuries in football. The evolving science details stunning new evidence of brain trauma, directly from routine football play. The question is, how will the recreation and interscholastic football communities, including its academic administrators, react to the evolving science. Will they treat this as hogwash; an diabolical and aggressive media with a bias or as parents and educators acting with the best interests of children.

Adults watch other adults pummel each other in the name of sport; hockey, football, boxing, bare-hand kickboxing. These games have morphed from competitive skill into a bizarre celebration of violence to the human body. The participants are well paid. They know and disregard the present, future and historical danger to their bodies for your entertainment and to gain large sums of money. It is quite another recreation decision to watch children do the same thing in the name of a town or school spirit. Or to place another trophy on the mantel or as a script for water cooler bragging rights at work.

Information Age science is confounding, eat less meat, eat more meat, take vitamins, well they are less beneficial than we thought- maybe; drink diet drinks, no change that - diet drinks increase appetite. The cynic finds fault in the mere debate and legitimizes personal behavior by rejecting the abundance of diametrically opposed information; the code of cigarette smoking and many other personal vices.

One of the massive paradoxes of the Information Age is new information; awakenings we thought we would never receive. We are forced to confront information when it hits us square in the intellect. The educated person with common sense has no escape. The process challenges us on the life style choices we made which we thought were safe and reasonable. As adults we accept responsibility or evade personal accountability for risky and dangerous lifestyle choices. As parents we accept our responsibility to arrive at popular and at times extremely unpopular decisions which will affect our children’s life at the moment and the consequences of those decisions in years to come. If your child plays football you will be at those cross roads in the near future, perhaps this Sunday. You will be forced to contend with a decision between short term personal pride and the possibility of irrevocable brain injury. To many … it’s a no brainer.

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