Wearing the right equipment when playing sports is important to keeping your child safe from injury. During fairly active or violent sports like hockey or football, you need to make sure that your children have the right types of football helmets or mouthguards or pads in order to protect their bodies. It’s easy as a parent to try and cut down on costs by eliminating some of the youth football gear that you think your kid might need but some of the smallest pieces are the most important. For example; a football mouthguard is always on the list of youth football equipment to buy. You may think that they can do without it or can just get away with a standard mouth guard, but you may also be interested to know how mouthguards help to prevent injuries. There are several reasons that a mouth guard is going to be very beneficial to your child. Here are just a few of the reasons for needing one:
How Mouthguards Help to Prevent Injuries
- Mouth guards protect the teeth, mouth, cheeks, tongue and jaw from over 200,000 oral injuries every year.
- They help guard against chipped and broken teeth.
- They can prevent fractured crowns, bridgework or any dental implants your child might have had done before.
- Lip and cheek injuries can be avoided.
- Certain types of injuries include root damage which cannot be fixed; mouth guards protect against this.
- They help guard against fractured jaws.
- Concussions can even be avoided by the use of a mouth guard.
Buying a mouth guard for your child is not an optional piece of equipment because of how mouthguards help to prevent injuries. If your child is participating in football, hockey, wrestling or boxing, the risk of injury is much increased. However, even other types of contact sports such as basketball, baseball or softball, soccer and even volleyball can be dangerous for the mouth and wearing a mouth guard for these sports as well would not be a bad idea.
One study showed that over 75% of injuries that have happened over the course of a year in high school were because the mouth guard was not being worn. So, if you think that the mouth guard is optional or not necessary, then you may want to think again.
Now that we have established how mouthguards help to prevent injuries, you may be interested to find out as well that custom made mouthguards will even further reduce athletes’ risk of concussion and other injuries.
A lot of high schoolers will wear the store bough, over the counter mouth guards and while these are acceptable according to school policy, studies show that someone wearing this is twice as likely to get a mild traumatic brain injury or concussion than if they had been wearing a custom made mouth guard that was made to properly fit their mouth. The helmet plays a big part in protecting our children, as we are well aware but research does show that a custom made mouth guard is an essential part of their protection. Of the 8.3 percent of athletes that suffered concussions during one study, only 3.6 of the 8.3 percent had custom made mouth guards.
As you can see, while a custom made mouth guard does not necessarily protect your child 100 percent from concussion or injury, the risk is highly reduced which is all we can really ask for. As much as we would like to protect our children entirely from getting hurt, sometimes we have to let them make their own decisions and decide which sport and which activity they want to be apart of. It’s hard to let them follow a passion, especially when that passion may end up with them getting hurt but we can do all we can in order to get them the right gear to protect themselves. After we have done our part, our job as parents is to attend every game and every rally and whatever they want us to go to and cheer them on, supporting them from the stands. This will mean more to them than if we forbade them from participating because of the dangers and risks. They likely wouldn’t understand that, anyway.
