Prioritizing Your Child’s Well-Being
What to Expect When Meeting with a Sport Health Professional
For kids and teens across the country, summer often brings more time spent outdoors. From practicing with a summer sports league to attending a camp, it is estimated that as many as 30 million youth are engaged in some type of summer opportunity.
However, with kids spending more time out of school and outside during the warmer months, there’s the added risk of injury, which also increases the potential for misconduct or abuse to occur. Medical settings can be a high-risk environment for abuse due to several factors: these settings often involve physical touch between practitioners and youth athletes, parents are sometimes not present during treatment, and doctors may prioritize getting athletes back on the field over fully healing an injury.
Parents and guardians, take a moment to learn how you can prioritize your child’s well-being. Explore five best practices health professionals should always follow and access a checklist to help you ensure your child’s health care provider is fostering treatment encounters centered on safety.
Health Professional Best Practices
Health professionals have a responsibility to create training and treatment spaces that keep athletes safe and minimize the possibility of abuse or misconduct.
As a parent or guardian, understanding key characteristics of appropriate behavior for a health care provider is essential to helping ensure your child receives the care they need in a safe setting.
Your child’s health care provider should always:
- Interact with your child respectfully and with appropriate professional boundaries.
- Allow you (or another guardian/adult) to be present while administering care to your child.
- Conduct meetings, exams, and treatments in a location that is accessible to others; doors should always remain unlocked.
- Explain treatment to you and your child in advance and encourage you both to ask questions.
- Obtain assent (i.e., agreement) from your child before performing any medical therapy or modality.
Whether your child needs support from an athletic trainer, a physical therapist, a doctor, or another medical professional, explore our checklist to help you determine if your child’s health care provider is prioritizing athlete safety.
Open the Dialogue
By understanding what to expect when seeking treatment for your child’s sports injury, you can help foster a safer experience for your child. Another important step is talking with your child or teen athlete about what actions are ok—and what actions are not.
Explore our Health Professional Encounter Do’s and Don’ts, which highlight appropriate versus inappropriate behavior. Talk through these examples with your child to help them understand the difference and come up with a plan of action if they find themselves in a situation that makes them feel uncomfortable.
For more tips and guidance on how you can help prevent, recognize, and respond to abuse in sport, explore our Parent and Guardian’s Handbook for Safer Sport.