There are many strong opinions on concussions, specifically youth concussions. Many parents fear for their children’s safety when participating in sports as they are young and still developing. Others agree that there are risks associated with sports, but they are not going to take their child out of something that they want to participate in, but instead just work around it. There is plenty of data that shows the recovery rates of concussions even in young children are greater than the non-recovery, extreme cases. It is absurd to remove your children from youth sports because of an injury which has been proven to recover just fine the majority off the time. 

Concussions have only recently been the talk of the dangers of youth sports. Concussions date back to the tenth century when a physician Muhammad ibn Zakariya Razi, wrote about concussions as they were distinctively different than other head injuries. A lot of history of concussions starts with the NCAA and the NFL, as they were the first two organizations to take concussions as a serious injury that should be treated as any other injury. In 1933, the NCAA first acknowledges concussions in its medical handbook for colleges and schools. Concussions have been known for years but not taken seriously till recent years after research has been able to provide more detail about them. In 2009 the NCAA was advised to adopt standardized concussions rules. In 2010, the NCAA adopted a concussions management policy. This is when concussions, specifically youth concussions were treated as a serious head injury that requires medical clearance. 

Parents are worried about their children’s safety, which is understandable. There seems to be a theme where parents only look at statistics of mild traumatic brain injuries (mTBI) where the child did not recover and now has a serious condition worse than the concussion. 