Everyday Philosophy: Should we prevent children from playing extreme sports?
Everyday Philosophy: Should we prevent children from playing extreme sports?
By Jonny Thomson | Published: 2025-01-10 15:14:00 | Source: Thinking – Big Think
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I desperately want someone to help me with aggressive public school sports. I think it’s time we stop letting each generation of males hit their frontal lobes for most of their development. We ask questions we know the answers to. Like why do our boys beat our girls or drink too much or commit sexual assaults. Hit yourself in the head every day for four years. You can even wear a helmet. I think every “pro” youth football adult should be hit in the head and helmet five times by another adult with a nerf bat for four years. Then ask them what they think about children who play soccer.
– Clayton, United States
It’s always a risk to make sweeping generalizations about a country, especially when you’re an outsider, but it seems to me that a significant number of Americans take their sports very seriously. It seems that “soccer” – or American football – is one of the most dangerous games. Year after year, American football ranks as the most popular sport in the United States, both in terms of school and college participation (men’s) and overall viewership. So, I’ll need to approach this question with caution.
The best way to evade sports-loving vitriol is to do what philosophy likes to do: extrapolate a general point. Rather than getting bogged down in the details of American football, I will look at extreme or aggressive sports more broadly. These are physically demanding sports and pose a high risk of serious injury.
First, we will look at the more utilitarian arguments against extreme sports from philosophers such as Pamela Sailors. Secondly, we will look at the famous paper by J. S. Russell (philosophically) on “The value of extreme sports“and”Children, extreme sports and entertainment“He gives two reasons why he believes extreme sports should not only be allowed, but encouraged.
We ban smoking – why don’t we ban extreme sports?
When discussing questions like these, which lie at the border between ethics and law, we invariably fall into utilitarian terminology. Almost all governments throughout history will base their laws on considerations of “the greatest interest of the greatest number of people.” Lawmakers and ethicists have to sit down and draw up a huge pros and cons table. They should seek the help of psychologists, doctors, physical therapists and teachers to ask about the benefits and drawbacks of banning extreme sports. If we focus on the disadvantages, there are two camps.
First, personality. Throughout an individual’s life, what harm does high exposure to contact sports do? Unsurprisingly, the evidence does not look good. Repeated concussions and head impacts in contact sports are associated with an increased risk of cognitive decline, depression, and neurodegenerative conditions. later in life, High-intensity contact sports It can cause memory and motor problems. Of course, these are statistics and probabilities, not rules – many people play extreme sports and do not suffer long-term medical damage. But here, the sailors use smoking as a counterexample. Smoking does not cause lung cancer in 100% of smokers. But it significantly and definitively increases the risk of lung cancer. Also, extreme sports will not harm everyone who practices them. But the sailors wonder: “One wonders what percentage (of deaths or brain damage) would be sufficient to remove the ‘unsubstantiated objection’ against banning dangerous sports for children.
The second utilitarian argument – which Clayton seems to argue for – is the societal argument. What does widespread and encouraged participation in extreme sports do to culture? Sailors argue that glorifying violence in extreme sports will both explicitly and implicitly glorify certain undesirable personality traits. She argues that “competition, aggression, violence and winning (at any cost)” will lead to a “culture of criminality” in which men adopt an “attitude of superiority over women”. Is it really possible to encourage a young person to be violent, aggressive and combative and then suddenly become a normal, respected member of society? Sailors don’t think so.
Russell: The skills that extreme sports give you
Even if we accept Sayers’ hypothesis that playing extreme sports makes you more aggressive and competitive – a claim that she herself admits is empirically “inconclusive” – is this always a bad thing? Life is rarely a pleasant walk by a lake. It is full of hardships, struggles and pain. There are very real challenges that all human beings face, both external, in the form of other people and other countries, as well as internal, in the form of mental health crises. We need to grow up a little. We need to learn to be resilient, strong, and yes, aggressive at times.
In his 2007 paper, Russell expresses this point as follows: “The most direct and convincing argument for including physical risks in a child’s environment is that the world is physically dangerous and the child needs to learn how to deal with these risks as quickly as possible. Completely eliminating any risk of physical injury from the environment would therefore leave children unprepared to confront physical risks or make sound decisions about risks in their daily lives.”
If we want to learn real-life skills, we need to get outside a little. We need to be exposed to real danger. You will only learn how to deal with things when you have things to deal with. We need a society full of people who can adapt.
The second point Russell makes in his defense of extreme sports is how they affect individual well-being and existential discovery. We thrive after overcoming real danger – not through the pampering “everybody wins!” Contests. As Russell said in his 2005 paper:
“An important kind of self-actualization requires confronting and attempting to transcend the apparent limits of oneself… Extreme sports, in their best examples—for example, mountaineering, boxing, or bicycle racing—provide one means of such self-assertion by challenging the entire self within the limits of one’s being. It is a particularly rich means of realization because it forces us to confront and overcome the fear of danger and to confront the physical threats of those things to which we cannot place value. On.”
In other words, we need to push ourselves to grow, and one of the best ways to do that is by playing extreme sports.
The turning of the scales
The reason this debate is often so heated and polarized is that both sides can be right. It is true that allowing – or even forcing – children to participate in extreme sports puts their current and future health at risk. It is probably true that those raised on a diet of competitive and aggressive masculinity may develop into unpleasant personalities in adulthood. But it’s also true that extreme sports are fun and often good for your mental health. They test you and strengthen you. They teach you to be tougher and that you can be tougher in the future when the future demands it.
And so, Clayton, the debate hinges not so much on philosophy or scientific data, but on our cultural values. What matters most to you? How risk averse are you when it comes to prohibiting or limiting risky activities? Most societies have decided that smoking is dangerous enough to deserve a ban on children. As well as knives, alcohol and fireworks. So why not practice extreme sports? Well, maybe the risk is that the benefit metrics aren’t that tilted yet.
So, what can we say? We can say that dangerous sports pose a significant risk to a child’s life. We can say that there is no conclusive evidence that playing extreme sports increases sexual assaults or any type of criminality in fact. Beyond that, however, this is about opinions and values.
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