Should Kids Play Football?

Participation in Youth Football

• Participation in football among kids is on the decline in the USA.
• Participation in high school football has dropped 12.2% since 2009.
• Participation in tackle football for kids between the ages of 6 and 12 has dropped by 29% since 2016 with flag football going up 15%. And tackle football participation dropped nearly 18% between 2020 and 2021 alone.
• What might be the explanation for this?

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• (https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2023-01-24/youth-football-participation-declining-amid-safety-concerns)

Participation in Youth Football

One reason is due to the increased awareness of the risks, in particular, the risk of brain injuries like concussions and CTE.

• “48 percent of Americans say they’d encourage a child who wanted to play football to play a different sport due to concerns about concussions — up 8 points since the same question was asked four years ago, according to the latest [2018] national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
• That includes 46 percent of parents with a child in the household (up 9 points since 2014), 53 percent of mothers (up 13 points) and 39 percent of fathers (up 6 points).” (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/first-read/poll-nearly-half-parents-would-discourage-football-due-concussions-n843836)

So the basic argument against kids playing football is an obvious one – it is dangerous to their health, and particularly their brain.

Reasons for kids to play Football

• But there are considerations on the other side.
• “Empirical research indicates that permitting children to engage in dangerous or risky forms of play is essential to their optimal development (Brussoni et al. 2012). For example, dangerous sport and play helps children to learn important risk assessment and management skills.”
• “It also promotes the cultivation of virtues such as courage, perseverance, and resilience.”
• Further, Findler points towards the arguments from Russell that we discussed last week.

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Weighing Risks

• The debate then, is about weighing risks.
• “I take it that both sides of the debate would agree that we should allow children to take risks, within limits. The question is whether football falls within those limits.”
• “what is at issue is whether football constitutes an appropriate or reasonable risk. By a ‘reasonable risk’, I mean a risk that is reasonable or justified, from a moral point of view, for a parent to allow her child to take.”
• Findler will claim that youth football is not a reasonable risk.

Against Youth Football

• “We all know that football puts one at risk of a number of different injuries, commonly including cuts, bruises, broken bones, torn ligaments and, in very rare instances, death. There are also familiar long-term problems associated with playing the sport. Former NFL players frequently suffer from depression compounded by excruciating pain due to degenerative arthritis in knees, hips, and backs.”

But only recently have we started to understand the full danger of football -- in particular, the risks of long-term brain injury.

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Youth Brain Injuries

• “Athletes under twenty years of age sustain the majority of sport-related head injuries (Purcell and Carson 2008, 106). And football, of all sports, puts one at the greatest risk of concussion (Daniel et al. 2012), with up to twenty percent of high school football players sustaining a concussion each year (Guskiewicz et al. 2003).”
• “Studies show that young athletes who have sustained two or more concussions suffer from ‘subtle yet significant prolonged neuropsychological effects’ that impair social and intellectual development (Moser, Schatz, and Jordan 2005).”

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Youth Brain Injuries

“The greatest cause for concern, however, is the increasingly large number of studies suggesting that the hundreds and thousands of subconcussive hits football players experience in the ordinary course of play can trigger debilitating neurodegenerative disease”

“Recent cases indicate, moreover, that CTE does not only affect older professional athletes. Autopsies performed on former college and high school football players have revealed early signs of CTE”

As we noted last time, in a 2017 study, all but one of 111 deceased former NFL players who donated their brains for research had evidence of CTE. Among former college players, 48 out of 53 showed the signs, as did three of 14 who played only in high school.

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Changes to Prevent Brain Injuries

In response, there has been a greater focus on avoiding and managing head injuries among athletes.

“the NFL has rules that prohibit tackling during the offseason and allow only 14 full-contact practices during the regular season.”

But in youth football there are no national rules – different areas/leagues/schools do things very differently.

“Nearly 60 percent of concussions in high school football and more than 70 percent of concussions in college football occur during practice. In the NFL, that number is 19 percent — and it’s down to about 6 percent during the regular season.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/24/concussions-nfl-football-brain-trauma/

Findler notes that “A recent study of high school football shows that players averaged 774 subconcussive impacts per season”

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Normative Implications

Those are descriptive facts, what are the normative implications?

“There is broad agreement that the justification for paternalistic interferences to protect children from risky behavior decreases as their capacity to make informed decisions increases. It seems reasonable to hold, then, that youth should not be permitted to play football until they are competent to provide informed consent.”

So, Findler thinks, we should not let kids play football. But when they are older and can properly understand the risks then they can choose to for themselves.

“The harms associated with football seem sufficiently serious, however, to warrant the more conservative position that children below sixteen should not play tackle football. For that is the age at which we may safely presume that youth can fully appreciate the very serious risks involved and thus make an informed decision about whether to assume those risks.”

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For Youth Football

“Many empirical studies suggest that children have a natural inclination toward risky play.”

“A study of Australian children ages 48 to 64 months that collected observational and interview data on 38 children indicated that when provided with a choice 74% of participants preferred to play on the more challenging playground equipment. Furthermore, while only 21% to 34% of children had experience using the higher risk equipment 70% to 90% expressed the desire to play on this type of equipment.” (Brussoni et al. 2012).

“Animal research demonstrates the propensity for risk taking during play across species. For example, primates at play deliberately expose themselves to moderately frightening situations where they repeatedly lose and regain control of bodily movements” (Brussoni et al. 2012).

For Youth Football

However, as Findler points out ‘Natural behavior is not necessarily morally permissible behavior.’

Rather, to argue for youth football we need to argue that participation is sufficiently valuable to offset the risks.

Of course, youth football improves physical fitness, motor skills, teamwork and so on. But so do lots of other sports, so that’s not really an argument for football.

Dealing with Danger

• Russell claims that `[t]he most direct and compelling argument for including physical risk in a child’s environment is that the world is physically dangerous and a child needs to learn to navigate those dangers as quickly as possible’.
• Dangerous sports teach risk-management skills. Further, they teach ”bravery, perseverance, resilience, independence and self-sufficiency.”

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Dealing with Danger

• “There is evidence that children learn risk management strategies for themselves and their peers as a result of risky play experiences. Observational studies of children at play found they exposed themselves to risk but displayed clear strategies for mitigating harm. Australian children, for the most part, engaged in behaviours that were well within their current capabilities. Children appeared aware of potential dangers and adjusted activities accordingly. Notably, children drew on their risk experiences not only to develop understanding of their own constitutions and skills, but also of playmates. These understandings facilitated support for each other’s risk engagement and safety.” (Brussoni et al. 2012).
• Three concerns: (i) Are such cases analogous to football? (ii) It’s not clear that the dangers of football are needed to teach these skills. (iii) Head injuries “may clearly undermine a child’s ability to make rational decisions, and thereby undermine the child’s ability to effectively manage risk and to acquire such virtues as physical and moral courage”.

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Self-affirmation

• We talked about Russell’s view that dangerous sports are important for self-affirmation and finding your limits.
• “extreme sports like [football], boxing, aerial trapeze walking and mountain climbing have special value because they challenge us to push the boundaries of who we are by extending in certain ways the physical, emotional, and intellectual limits of our finite, embodied selves. Thus, in an important sense, we learn and affirm who and what we are when we confront and extend the limits of our being”
• Self-affirmation “is about achieving flourishing by pressing individual boundaries and thus defining new self-understandings and conceptions of the self”

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Self-affirmation

• Can we not gain these benefits any other way though? What about ultra-marathons? Or weight-training? Don’t these allow us to push up against, and extend, our limits?
• Is there a special type of self-affirmation that comes from danger?
• Russell seems to think so: “dangerous sport in its best exemplars, particularly those in which substantial bodily danger is an immediate and ever-present risk, represents an opportunity for confronting and pressing beyond certain apparent limits of personal, and indeed human, physical and psychological capacities in ways not afforded by other normally available human activity.”

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Self-affirmation and Risk

• Even if there is such a distinct value to dangerous sports – why do we need to start with kids? Why can’t adults achieve that type of self-affirmation?
• And again, it’s not clear that we really need football for this. “there are other dangerous sports, such as skateboarding and free-style skiing, that provide opportunities for self-affirmation that children may reasonably be permitted to play or pursue.”
• Finder thinks there is no good justification for youth football and it is morally wrong to allow your child to play football.