Health & Safety

Because the use of mouth guards in youth and high school football, lacrosse, and ice hockey has been mandatory since the early 1970's, these sports have experienced a dramatic decline in the number of dental and jaw injuries. Instead, published reports show that the majority of mouth injuries occur in such popular youth sports as baseball, basketball, soccer, field hockey, softball and gymnastics, which lag far behind in injury protection. Recent studies also report that oral and facial injuries to female athletes exceed those in males.

Perhaps because the damage caused by emotional abuse in youth sports is not obvious, like sexual abuse, or immediately apparent, like a physical injury, its effect is often overlooked and minimized. But the damage is no less real, and, in fact, may be much more damaging and long-lasting.

Emotional abuse is a serious and widespread problem in youth sports and takes many forms: parents angrily criticizing their child's sports performance, coaches angrily yelling at a player for making a mistake, and youth athletes being teased or yelled at by a fan or seen a fan angrily yell at or tease another player.

Because the signs and symptoms of concussions are not obvious as a broken leg or a sprained ankle and are often very subtle, because the vast majority don't involve a loss of consciousness, and because self-reporting by athletes is critical to the detection and treatment of concussions, the only way parents can sit in the stands without worrying sick about what might happen if their son or daughter suffers a concussion is if they know they and their child's program takes concussions very seriously and that every member of the team is using the same playbook.

Since 2000 MomsTeam has been a leader in on-line education about the dangers of sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) in children playing sports, either as a result of a congenital heart abnormality or from an ill-timed blow to the chest from a ball or stick that sends the heart into a potentially fatal arrhythmia (a condition called Commotio Cordis).

The best way for parents to keep their children safe while playing sports is by becoming educated themselves. If parents are aware of the most common injuries in the sport their child is playing and how to prevent those injuries they can insist that their child’s program take the steps needed to keep them healthy and in the game.