I have often been accused of talking to myself, out-loud, and I will plead guilty to that. But today I am going to actually make the case for both letting your kids play football and not letting your kids play football. This week, Chris Borland of the San Francisco 49ers walked away from pro football after just one season. He claims his own personal investigation and soul-searching led him to the conclusion that the possibility of suffering brain damage just wasn’t worth living out his dream. It got a LOT of players thinking about their own situations. So here is the argument, both for and against, over whether parents should let their children play football. LET YOUR KIDS PLAY! There are a lot of good reasons to let your kids play football. First, there are the standard “learning to be on a team” and “learning to work with others” arguments. Both vary valid. Football is a great place to develop discipline, work ethic and sportsmanship. Also consider that football, maybe more than other sports, is a test of your will and spirit. How hard is a person willing to work to get what they want? How much are you willing to do to make sure you can move the line three feet on 4th-and-goal in late October? How much does it matter to you that you are a second-stringer? It’s also a sport that probably best articulates to a youngster what his real life will be like. In football, and in life, you will get knocked down. What does it take to get back up again? Sometimes you, through no fault of your own or because of a bad break, will find yourself in a hole. Do you have what it takes to climb out of that hole or just give up and accept what “is”? It’s by the far the most physically demanding sport, and because of that the friendships you make are deeper. When you tough it out, the people you tough it out with mean more to you because they understand you like almost no one else. You don’t see a lot of 20-year golf team reunions, right? Football players name their children after each other, they find excuses to see each other and they LOVE telling stories about their experiences together to anyone who will listen. As a responsible parent, I will let my kid play football, but I will know who their coaches are and I will know what they teach and how they teach it. I will make sure that my kids are being taught the proper techniques in hitting, tackling and being tackled, and in blocking. And if those coaches allow improper technique I am going to that coach, and then to the league operators to make sure the person who is teaching my kid is teaching him correctly. And sure, there is the possibility that my kid will get hurt playing football, and maybe that injury could be a serious one or lead to long-term health issues. Consider this: When you put your child into a vehicle to drive them somewhere you are about 10 feet from hitting every car coming from the other direction head-on. Isn’t it fair to think that your kids have as-good or better of a chance suffering the same sort of injury riding their bike (most don’t even wear a helmet for that!), or riding in a car, or doing something else? Whether you believe in God or fate or Karma, what’s going to happen is going to happen! THERE IS NO WAY I WILL LET MY KID PLAY FOOTBALL. Life in 2015 is about managing risk – that’s in your money, that’s in your relationships and that’s in pretty much everything you do. I want my kid to experience the joy of playing in team sports, but I can pick lots of sports for them to play with little or no risk of them suffering a brain injury. I want my kids to learn the life lessons that sports teach like no other activity can do, but I also want them to be able to walk without a limp, be able to run after their own grandkids, and be able to have a dependable memory as they get older. Playing football puts that at risk, and it’s not a risk worth allowing my kids to take. There is so much risk anyway: things like childhood diseases, motor vehicle accidents … everyday things put kids at risk enough. Letting them play a sport where people intentionally try to push each other around and knock each other down is excessive and unnecessary and why on earth would I put my child in harm’s way? SO WHO WINS? That depends on you. I can’t tell you what you should or shouldn’t do, and I won’t try. You have to look yourself in the mirror when it’s all over and say “I did the right thing.” Many football parents will tell you that they would NEVER trade the experience their kids gained from playing football. But there are a few who would point to their kids and say one hard hit to their kid’s head was one too many.
