I
recently read an article about parents might want to rethink their use of
“sippy cups” because children have to visit the emergency room each year with
sippy-cup-related injuries.
These
articles appear from time to time. The author
identifies some common household item and informs us that the item actually
hurts a certain number of people each year.
Usually, the item is as innocuous was possible: teddy bears, toilet
paper, sippy cups, etc. Quite often, the
statistics are misleading: “Since, 1970, 40,000 people have been injured by
using Cuddly-Soft Moist Towelettes.” Of
course, over the course of forty years, that works out to a thousand a
year. Ten million people might use
Cuddly-Soft Moist Towellets each year, which means that only one in
ten-thousand of them get injured.
However, saying that CSMT’s have a one-in-ten-thousand chance of
injuring you doesn’t make for nearly as interesting of a story.
This
kind of story does two things. First, it
makes us feel like America
Both
of these things make it very difficult to argue that something is actually
harmful. Conditioned by a barrage of
silly, scare-tactic stories, people automatically conclude that any scary story
must be silly, and that the numbers used must be fudge or—at the very least—misleading.
Football
apologists are already using both of those arguments, either in their heads as
they read this book, or to others as they discuss it.
However,
this is not one of those instances.
Intuitively, most of us realize that using a sippy cup and playing
football cause unbelievably different degrees of risk. The numbers would certainly support that
intuition: sippy cups are NOT the number one cause of emergency-room visits for
young children. Football IS the
number-one cause of brain injuries for young men.
Don’t
be tempted into dismissing a ridiculous and irresponsible risk just because
people are afraid of stupid things; weigh the risk with sober judgment and
decide whether its benefits warrant the dangers.
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