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The recent court case involving John Orsini’s fight to keep his teenage son from a fifth documented concussion brings light to the challenge of parenting and sharing decisions about children. This is my story and insight.
Tackle football was a way of valuing myself for 14 years.
When I was 18 and being recruited to play college football, I was excited. I felt valued and understood by the recruiters, which in turn helped me feel valuable to my parents, who were themselves not very healthy emotionally. To get their approval I practiced ignoring my fear of being hurt and hurting others….again, this was to feel approval.
Having been a counselor in schools and now in private practice for forty years has clarified my understanding that being valued is necessary for health and growth. We are all designed to grow as part of families. Sometimes this means finding our way through conflicts within ourselves and our parents.
The boy’s mother said her son is old enough to consider the consequences and decide for himself. The father and I disagree with this belief. Here’s why.
A seventeen-year-old male in the United States is awash with cultural pressures and daily decisions regarding who and how to be. These cultural pressures include how to become a man. This pressure is part of natural development. No argument that all cultures teach both boys and girls the values which grow a healthy society.
The challenge is deciding which beliefs are healthy and which are not. A quick look at becoming a worthwhile man in my view:
• Stay alive and grow
• Develop an understanding of how to stay alive and grow
• Help others in their efforts to stay alive and grow
A lesson I learned playing youth, high school, college and pro football
While the jury is out and probably will not return a unanimous verdict about the advantages and disadvantages of football, my experience in playing tackle football from the age of 8 to 22 developed along these lines.
Like all children I wanted my parents and the world to accept and approve of me. My parents didn’t quite learn to approve of themselves and each other, which upped the amperage on my need for a guarantee that they didn’t disapprove of me. In response, I did whatever I could to be an approvable person: school, altar boy, cub scout, paper route.
Along with being smart in school and helpful at home and in life outside home came awareness of my father’s athletic history. He was an Olympic hockey player. Athletics were obviously important to him, so they become one of my standards as well. Football came into view as a way to get approval.
When I got my first helmet, pads, cleats there was a welling of excitement in my body. This preparation felt right, like I was doing ‘the right thing’. That all changed when we lined up for tackling practice. After the coaches, probably 20 years old, showed us in slow motion the correct form for tackling with our shoulders and arms, we lined up for ‘full go’ tackling.
The physical and emotional feeling of that first collision remains within my body to this moment. It hurt, brought all my awareness into my body as being under attack. Dreamlike, carried along in fear and pain, I got up and felt the loud thump on my helmet of the coach’s hand and heard him say,
“Great tackle boy”.
As I walked to the back of the line to await my next turn, I wanted to get on my bike and go home, see my dog and go for a walk in the field. But in a moment it was my turn again. So I did it again. And again.
It wasn’t until I became a father and responsible for the lives and growth of my own children that the football lesson started to become clear. My habit of raging for a few seconds to suppress the fear of being hurt so I could get approval confused my intimate interactions. I began to see that any time vulnerability arose, in myself or my wife and children, the angry response I had was damaging to them and me.
Football is a choice to be violent.
The moment of overcoming fear to participate in the tackling in football is unhealthy. It’s not necessary. Team sports can be a great means of learning to work through our fears and disappointments towards common goals.
The overcoming of fear is important situationally. Playing a game with a consensus of temporarily striving against each other can help us deal with unpredicted dilemmas. Choosing to help another being who is helpless, that can be commendable.
Willingness to hurt another person or ourselves, as part of earning approval, is immature. Healthy approval, i.e. the longing for parental and social support, is missing when children become dangerous to each other. Our job as parents is to protect our children and help them learn to protect themselves and others, including eventually their own children. The Orsinis are publically sharing how hard this can be.
Learning To Be Emotionally Violent
The violence in tackle football is not just physical. It requires also mental and emotional processes to ignore and overrule natural fear. The choice to repeatedly ignore and cause physical danger must become a habit to play this game. Can this use of violence infect family life as well?
In the counseling profession in parenting, we address the confusion others feel which turns into disregard for health and safety. Self-harming is the biggest problem. But we also work to avoid hurting others. We try to help those who are depressed, afraid, acting irrationally to see the world and their choices differently. We reflect to them choices they themselves do not see.
Is a17-year-old wise and seasoned enough to evaluate consequences? More importantly, are the parents? It’s not a simple question. Rather it’s a question that leads to another question: Am I valuing and protecting life?
Both parents are convinced they are right. What about the son’s motivation? Isn’t this the parents’ bottom line, teaching healthy motivation?
My experience is that the collision of bodies in tackle football is unnatural, fear-based and ultimately unpredictably dangerous. We know young boys die from head injuries in football. The action of running full speed at each other with the intention of knocking the other person down is simply violent.
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The Disposability of Men/CTE Social Interest Group
Tuesday at 9 pm Eastern / 6 pm Pacific
The Disposability of Men/CTE Social Interest Group will begin by focusing on concussions, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), and violence, but we will also expand out to discuss the larger issues of how men are treated in times of war, in times of crisis, in the workplace, and how they are portrayed in the media. This is a way for people interested in these issues to come together to talk about it in a community of people who can learn, grow, and create social change together, whether through writing on the topic, creating videos, podcasts, activist campaigns, and building a network to amplify our message. The Disposability of Men Social Interest Group will create content, interface with other groups working in the area, and forge a path to actual social change.
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