Fact: the football equipment including helmets of today are far more safety designed than the ones of my youth. Fact: Rules have changed in many contact sports to lessen the chance of serious injuries. Any kid is safer playing a contact sport than the drive in a vehicle getting there to start with.
You can over protect to the point of a child becoming dysfunctional lacking any confidence. Previous generations such as my grandparents born in the late 1800's knew this. So did my parent born in the late 1920's. Dad and his brother back in the late 1930's early 1940's would spend their summers alone at a river camp hunting and fishing from about age 12 on. My grandfather or an uncle checked on them on the weekends. They were 40 miles from home. They did know a nearby farmer they could go to in an emergency but other than that they were doing what they enjoyed. A river contains risk requiring skill. My uncle and grandfather taught it to them before leaving them to camp alone. Today that would get a CPS call for abuse. What abuse?
The sports injury hysteria stem from the same mindset as the anti-gun mindset. Think not? What excuse do they use? It's for da children usually. I was raised in a home with firearms well within my reach all my childhood. Mom didn't have locks on cabinets in the kitchen etc. We were brought up Hands Off and a busted sitter reinforced it. Today what do we see? Busting a child's butt is child abuse now and parents who don't lock up guns and cabinets are criminals. What's wrong with this picture?
Adults as parents are being suckered into liberal mindset thinking one agenda at a time. Liberals have changed even conservative homes and how parents bring up children however most are oblivious to the fact because it was done slowly over a generation of time.
Part of the paranoid parenting of today may be due to better information delivery (i.e., the Internet). Part of it is also due to crazies out there that used to be locked up...but not anymore. Part of it is also due to a country that continues to ‘evolve’ ethnically, and not in a good way.
However, my point wasn’t about society in general, it was about how the SAME PEOPLE that helicopter over their kids allow them to bash their brains in playing football, when the long-term results are a given (regardless of the lack of immediate impacts)...they seem to drop the hovering when it comes to football, knowing full-well the damage it’s doing...my point is that these parents feel some sense of superiority over other parents or else they’d put an end to their kids playing football, as they do with just about everything else potentially harmful to their kids.