4 Popular Activities That Should Be Illegal for Kids
Kids grow up so fast these days, but apparently not fast enough for some people. Thanks to overly zealous parents hellbent on fast tracking their progeny through life, infants are dropping beats at Baby DJ School and 5 year olds are working the pole at weekly kids pole dancing classes, proving it's never too late to have the cool, hip childhood Oakley Frogskins you dreamed of . No harm, no foul, right? While pretending your 3 month old has any interest in learning how to beat match is mostly just a benign exercise in parental ego stroking, there are certain activities that really aren't for kids. Youngins don't have the capacity to make an educated, informed choice in the matter, so they are forced to rely on the guidance of the grown ups around them. Are these guardians doing their charges a disservice by allowing them to pursue activities that REALLY should be for fully formed adults only?
4. Playing Football Isn't for Kids (or Probably Anyone)Football. It's as American as credit card debt and police brutality. Every year, the NFL dominates the list of most watched televised sporting events, and for the past 30 years has been named the nation's favorite sport. Nothing even comes close to the stranglehold football has on the hearts and minds of the sports loving public, so no surprise that it's also the brutal sport of choice for millions of America's youth."If you tell anyone you have a concussion, your parents won't love you anymore."
Football is so ingrained in the fiber of our culture it seems there's no scandal large enough to knock it off its battered, archaic pedestal. Nothing, not even accusations of racism, ritualistic hazing, or domestic abuse seems to be able to dampen the popularity of the game. With so many negatives currently surrounding the sport, it's easy to forget one other pesky downer .
Every week, fans of the pro game suffer through an endless Cheap Oakley Frogskins Sunglasses parade of mind numbingly inane commercials and tedious punditry in heady anticipation of the holy grail of the sport . the hard hit. There's nothing like watching oversized, testosterone addled men willfully hurl themselves at each other to get the blood of the American sports fan pumping. But all this bloodlust comes with a price. Cheap Oakley Polarized Frogskins And that price is extracted in pounds of fleshy gray matter. Last year the NFL was forced to pay out at least $765 million to thousands of players who suffered irrevocable injuries as a result of playing the game.
If these adults had a hard time making an informed decision about their safety, how are children going to fare? And the problem gets exponentially worse when you look at participation levels. The NFL has fewer than 2,000 athletes. By a wide margin, the largest group of football players/potential brain damage victims are people too young to catch an R rated movie without being accompanied by a grown up. Football is just as Cheap Oakley Polarized Frogskins dangerous in the Pee Wee leagues. Thanks to their little pencil necks, impacts among elementary school kids are proportionally as severe as those seen at the adult level, and the average high school player is almost twice as likely to suffer a brain injury as someone playing in college. The long term effects have yet to be adequately studied, but there is growing evidence that the longer you've played, the more likely your memory is going to be screwed up. Unlike the pros, who have a cadre of highly trained specialists watching over their every move and rehabilitation effort, young players suffer through injuries with no one looking after their well being except for a coach/dad whose main qualification is usually "abundant free time on the weekends.""Also, your friends will think you're a baby."
Not that it makes up for permanent brain injury, but the average pro salary is around $2 million. Kids, who often have no real say in the matter of whether they play or not and are legally too young for informed consent, have only swigs of Gatorade and fleeting moments of glory as compensation for time spent as miniature battering rams.
Even when presented with all the possible negatives, parents continue to send their kids onto the field. Not even celebrity anti endorsements seem to stem the tide. Bob Costas, President Obama, and Brett Favre have all said they don't think the gridiron is any place for a child. If their warnings don't convince you, how about the fact that Adrian Peterson, a pro football player and parent who's in no danger of being named father of the year, has said he'd never let his kids play the game.
3. Children Have No Business Owning GunsEven though it would be the most adorable viral video ever, there's a reason we don't let 5 year olds drink beer and drive cars. Children are partially evolved humans who have no qualms about eating dead flies off windowsills, have a penchant for getting their heads stuck between things, and throw epic temper tantrums.
Should these miniature disaster magnets really be allowed to own their own guns? Any sane person would say, "Of course not." Don't worry sane people, the government agrees with you . sort of. Federal law actually prohibits handgun ownership by anyone under the age of 18. However, there's no minimum age to own your own rifle or shotgun. That's left up to the states to decide. Twenty states and the District of Columbia do have minimum age laws that range from as old as 21 in Illinois to as young as a puberty straddling 14 in Montana. However, in the remaining 30 states it's totally legal for your little Annie or Andy Oakley to own a shotgun.