Author: dadlabs
Added: Tue, 13 May 2008 00:16:23 -0800
Duration: 167

DadLabs Ep. 318 The Lounge - One of the most super-cool aspects of parenting: all the guilt and regret. Mix that with consumerism and you have this episode. We ask out experienced parents if there was one baby item they wish they would have indulged ...

Every family has its orthodoxies, large and small, assumed and shared values that undergird the household.  One of these for us: sports are good for kids, especially girls.  Both my wife and I were college athletes.  We think that Title IX is one of the glories of American civilization for what is has done for women's athletics, and for a generation of women and girls.

We have gently guided out six-year-old girl away from Hannah Montana and toward Mia Hamm.  When she expressed a preference for basketball over dance, we were quietly satisfied.  My wife has been very overt that cheerleading is forbidden.  We both wept our way through In These Girls Hope is a Muscle.  As teachers we have watched literally thousands of girls, over fifteen years in the classroom, benefit in the areas of self-esteem, confidence, and body-image as a result of participation in athletics.

And there have been plenty of studies that show sports help girl delay sexual activity, avoid drugs and alcohol, reduce eating disorders, and serve them well in their careers.

I sincerely hope, and if pushed would probably insist, that my daughter will participate in sports.  Orthodoxy.

The fun starts when information emerges that, as a parent, really forces you to question your assumptions.  Michael Sokolove's article "The Uneven Playing Field" in this weekend's New York Times Magazine was a gobsmacker for me.  I kept shaking my head as I read page after page of his description and analysis of the epidemic of injuries plaguing high school and college age female athletes.

I won't summarize the article because if you have female children you will read it this instant without hesitation or objection.  You must read it now.

The frequency of injury statistics (the article focuses on ACL injuries, but the news on concussions is equally bad) had me putting down the magazine to ponder.  Five times more frequent?  Times five! Orthodoxies are not easily shed, so I needed confirmation.  The director of a girl's soccer club is a close friend.  Over breakfast I asked him how many ACL injuries he had in the past season.

"Two."

"Really, that's not bad, just two in the whole club."

"Oh, the whole club?  I thought you meant my team.  Twelve."

One club.  One season.  A dozen girls with ruptured ACLs.  It quite literally took my breath away.

In the article, club sports and specialization predictably come under heavy shelling, but as hard as Sokolove tries not to say it, the underlying message here is that any intense team sport puts girls at a very high risk of serious injury.  Parents seemingly get a bye as the article characterizes girls submersed in a warrior culture insisting that they be allowed to push themselves beyond the limit.

My wife and I are not alone in our orthodoxy.  Belief in girl's sports has become conventional wisdom backed up with the power of political correctness.  To assert that competitive athletics may be hurting our girls is a tough one to make, and an even tougher one to swallow.  This is a particularly personal issue for me, as my leg is pinstriped and crisscrossed with long scars from ACL reconstruction attempts performed before orthroscopes came into use.  Jogging is out of the question.  A knee replacement is in my future; it's just a matter of when.

So I told my son that football was off limits.  Does that mean by extension that I should be turning the Hannah Montana back on?  Talking up fashion? (Dance and cheerleading are certainly no safer.)

The article did offer some hope.  Some sports medicine wonks believe that improving core strength (training these girls harder?) will reduce injuries, though the jury is out large study-wise.  I certainly hope that this is true, because I simply do not want to be in the position to decide that despite the huge and permanent risks to my daughter, that sports are still worth it.