Brooke de Lench

Too often, parents are in the dark about the important role they play in their child's recovery from concussion and the all-important decision on when it is safe for their child to return to the playing field. The sixth right of parents under the Parent's Concussion Bill of Rights is therefore the right to receive written notice of injuries suffered by their child and to provide written consent before their child is allowed to return to play.

Parents should have the right to expect, if their child is playing contact or collision sports, that he or she undergo pre-season baseline and post-injury neuropsychological testing as the current consensus statement on concussions recommends for athletes in such sport, regardless of age or competitive level.

MomsTEAM has been advocating for years that every U.S. high school should have an athletic trainer on staff, given their key role in assessing and treating sports injuries, including concussions, and in making return to play decisions. While only 60-65% of schools have an AT, recent statistics suggest that fully 85-90% of high school athletes are now working with ATs on a daily basis.

The sad fact, and what makes it sometimes hard for parents to truly believe that programs are taking concussions seriously, is that many of the sports programs in which their children participate do not follow any set of return-to-play guidelines, and if they do follow guidelines, they are too liberal in terms of same-day return-to-play (RTP). Thus, the third point in the Concussion Bill of Rights for parents is that the athletic director or administrator, coach, athletic trainer and team doctor have, at the very least, agreed upon and adopted a philosophy for grading and managing concussions before the start of the season which prohibits players who experience concussion signs or symptoms from returning to the same game or practice, and use it consistently during the season, regardless of the athlete or circumstances surrounding the injury.

Because coaches have the strongest influence on a student-athlete's decision to report a concussion, more concussion education of coaches, including the need to report concussions, however, minor, and the creation of a safe reporting environment are critical, experts say, to combating chronic underreporting of concussion.

In her keynote address to the 2nd Annual Sports Concussion Summit in Marina del Ray, California MomsTeam.com founder Brooke de Lench offered suggestions on how parents, coaches, officials, administrators, athletic trainers, clinician, current or former professional athlete, and sports safety equipment manufacturer, could work together as a team to protect the nation's children against the serious, life-altering consequences of concussions.

In 1992, the American College of Sports Medicine first recognized that girls and women in sports were particularly susceptible to three interrelated conditions – disordered eating, menstrual irregularity, and osteoporosis – that have come to be known as the "female athlete triad."