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“Mum… Dad… can I please play a game where I’m most likely to suffer from head injuries? Please?”
So, what is your answer to this… yes or no?
Well in Australia, this answer seems more often than not to be “Yes mate, you bet, knock yourself out!”
I’ve written this extreme scenario in an attempt to remove emotion from the question, to present it only in the light of a cold, hard fact, because that is exactly what the cold, hard factual evidence an Australian Government agency has discovered… and I’m not talking about the ‘facts’ commonly espoused by the likes of Donald Trump and Malcolm Roberts.
An Australian Institute of Health and Welfare publication, “Australian sports injury hospitalisations 2011–12”, analyses and catalogs the nature and extent of injuries suffered from playing specific sports across Australia.
Of note in this work is that AFL is one of just two sports where “the most common body region injured” is the head.
The one other sport is cycling. This is caused by “transport accidents”, however for AFL it is caused by “contact with person”.
As such, the most common injury type in the game is a head injury via contact with another person – not so much an extreme accident but arguably an unfortunate but not unexpected injury via normal play.
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is the leading cause of disability and death in children and adolescents in the US according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
While the symptoms of a brain injury in children are similar to the symptoms experienced by adults, the functional impact can be very different. Children are not little adults. The brain of a child is continuing to develop.
The assumption used to be a child with a brain injury would recover better than an adult because there was more ‘plasticity’ in a younger brain.
More recent research has shown that this is not the case. A brain injury actually has a more devastating impact on a child than an injury of the same severity has on a mature adult.
The cognitive impairments of children may not be immediately obvious after the injury but may become apparent as the child gets older and faces increased cognitive and social expectations for new learning and more complex, socially appropriate behavior.
These delayed effects can create lifetime challenges for living and learning for children, their families, schools and communities. Some children may have lifelong physical challenges.
I am a sports-nut who has loved playing a number of contact sports. I too am sure that there are modified rules in the playing of AFL for juniors to reduce the expectation of contact and so probability of head injuries.
I do though wonder that given the prevalence of head-injuries in the game, whether exposing children to AFL at a time their bodies and brains are still in formative years and susceptible to damage is the ideal option. At best, it could direct them in later years into a game whose most common form of injury, is to the head.
So the question you must ask yourself is, are you willing to risk telling your child, “You bet mate, knock yourself out!”
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