AP Photo/Susan Ragan
Open Discussion:
This comment came in from Kristine on the blog post about Aly Raishman’s parents who have a very physical (and hysterically funny) reaction to watching their daughter perform on the uneven parallel bars:
Given that gymnastics on an olympic level is a high-performance sport which causes quite a lot of damage to the body, shouldn’t that be “they’re obviously abusive parents”?
This is an interesting question to debate.
In high-level sports, damage is unavoidably done to the body. Broken bones, repeated sprains and tears, and in some sports, head injuries.
A lot of attention has been paid to the suicides of professional football players which are more and more being attributed to the concussions they suffer starting as young as Pee Wee football league.
As parents, do we have a responsibility to protect our children from injuries such as these, or is it more important to cultivate and support the dreams of such focused and talented children?
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I was being glib in my response to the poster in the other thread. Un-nuanced statements got an un-nuanced response from me. I think it is wrong to summarily group all parents who support their children doing physically demanding sports as “abusive parents” with parents who compel their children into sports as an end to their own means.
“As parents, do we have a responsibility to protect our children from injuries such as these, or is it more important to cultivate and support the dreams of such focused and talented children?” – Not being a parent, this question isn’t addressed to me. But I’ve spent some time thinking about my parents approach to questions like this. Our family has always fallen on the side of “cultivate and support” but part of that has always been talking about the very real dangers of sports.
It depends on whether the parents are forcing the child to participate in the sport or if the child chooses it on their own. As long as society takes the position that a 13 year old girl should have ultimate bodily autonomy (read abortion rights), I don’t see why any child would have less right to bodily autonomy in other circumstances such as participation in sports.