It’s well-known fact, that nowadays sport is essential part of daily life. Everybody wants to be in a shape, to be strong and healthy. You can hear it everywhere that sport is a life and doing sport makes you better. But sport could be also dangerous, especially for kids. Kids that are given to sport get injured and the consequences are not really good. So that is why there are articles on this theme, many questions and many thoughts about that. One of the most important theme is a collision sports (football, hockey..) where concussions very often takes place. The children’s brain is a very vulnerable and according to some researches, concussions could lead to some problems with memory, personality changes, even dementia. And there are also the death cases. So this is something for parents to think about before giving their children to these kinds of sport. Several years ago there wasn’t enough information about that, but nowadays there are 2 permanent persons who made some research in order to enlighten this sphere. Each of them has a subjective point of view. One of them is Dr.Cantu who believes that children under age of 14 are not allowed to play collision sport. And it doesn’t matter what age a child start playing, he could achieve great results if it is in his genes, but not in the early age, because it is too dangerous for the health and life in general. The another one is Dr. Guskiewicz who believes that kids could start playing collision sports any time but only under the control of well-educated coach and with good equipment. Well, to my mind, both of the opinions deserve to be accepted, but I am more positive about Dr. Guskiewicz point of view. I agree that kids have to be taught and develop proper and safe skills in a game, the tackling techniques. Of course we could provide kids with all necessary equipment (sport uniform, helmets), but the most important is provide the future sportsman with a very good couch who could teach them how to handle the contact safely and develop all that against contestant. So I agree that skill development in sport is very important and the age of 9 0r 10 is a very good period to learn blocking and tackling techniques that could be later used in competitions. And in the end, I want to say about risk. There is a risk everywhere. When you start doing something new, you take a risk. Life is risky thing, and the kids have to understand that from the very beginning. They have to understand that life is a tough thing-you get hurt, you fall down and then you have to recover and go ahead. Kids who are in sport are different kind of kids; they are braver, stronger and more resistant. But the most important thing, it doesn’t’ matter what sphere, is to have a good tutor: in life it is a family, in sport it is a couch. So if kids are taught properly and the equipment is good, it is much better to star earlier. But the couch has to be the master of what he does.
Sources:
- De Lench, Brooke. “When Bob Cantu Says No Collision Sports Before Age 14, Parents Need to Listen.” Moms TEAM: The Trusted Source For Sports Parents. Moms TEAM Mag, Web. 15 September 2011.
- Stevens, Tim. “Concussion Experts Differ On Youth Sports Safety.” New observer:Sports.Newsobserver.com. Web. 12 February 2012.
