IN AN age when our children’s brains are coddled like hothouse orchids, with cradle-to-college enrichment curricula offered to parents seeking to lift their offspring’s IQ into the Ivy range, I may be putting my 9-year-old’s still-developing brain at risk. And I’m not sure what to do.
Teddy is a Newton Mustang - that is, a player on our town’s Pop Warner football team. At 8 he begged to begin playing. Eight seemed early, but when a child displays a level of longing you’ve never seen in him before, you pay attention. The summer before third grade we signed him up.
This meant four two-hour practices a week for an entire steamy August, with plenty of running, conditioning, drills - and hitting. It meant three two-hour practices a week when school started, and crack-of-dawn Sunday morning games. Through all this my third-grader never complained once. Couldn’t wait for practice. Bounced awake for games. By early November, oppressive August heat was a distant memory. Thirty-eight degrees? Icy, slanting rain? Didn’t matter to Teddy.
We’re veterans now, in his second year. I don’t put the hip pads in upside-down anymore, I know the ins and outs of working the concession stand, and my husband has joined the board, coordinating sales of “Mustang wear’’ and helping to plan the banquet. What veteran status has bestowed on Teddy, besides a place to focus his considerable energy, is physical discipline, mental toughness, and the role models of several impressive coaches - men who demand much of these kids, brook no half-hearted efforts from them, bluntly point out their mistakes, and exuberantly celebrate their progress.
I’ve never seen my son stand as straight as he did when Coach Bill called him over after a practice his first season and shook his hand for working hard. After a recent tough loss, when our team had dominated until a fourth-quarter resurgence by their opponents, Coach Bill rallied the players into a line, striding up and down their dejected ranks, shouting, “Here is your life lesson! This moment. How will you handle this, right now?’’ There are coaches and there are coaches, and we are lucky in ours.
But besides life lessons, young players may be getting something else if they stick with football: repeated trauma to the brain that no helmet, however high-tech, can neutralize. A recent NFL study revealed that dementia and other cognitive disorders occur among former pro players several times more often than in the general population. Malcolm Gladwell, writing for the New Yorker, cites a study of college players showing that a routine hard hit to a helmet can approximate the force of a head hitting the windshield when a car slams into a wall at 25 miles per hour. In a single game or practice, Gladwell reports, a player may experience several of these hits, without any of them being deemed an injury. And the cumulative trauma, it turns out, matters.
My son does not yet inhabit a fully grown body that hits and is hit that hard. But what the studies don’t tell us, because it hasn’t been studied, is how many blows, when you start at 8 and keep going through high school, are too many?
Before this latest research we saw no need to curtail football in our house. Safety is stressed at practice, and many sports have risks. I don’t think my son’s two seasons of football have harmed him in any way. Far from it. But ahead lie bigger and faster teams, where the bodies charging one another will no longer weigh 90 pounds.
Sometimes, when I am looking to levy a consequence for my 9-year-old’s misbehavior, I threaten to take away an allowance or a play date, or even - when I am out of patience - a football practice. The changed behavior is as immediate as the fiercely histrionic response: “Why would you want to take away the only thing in my life that has meaning?’’
Why, indeed. One more regular season game. Go, Mustangs.
Suzanne Matson, a professor in the English department at Boston College, is the author of the novel “The Tree-Sitter.’’ 
