For Parents and Young Athletes
Is your child injured or in pain?
Kids Are Not Mini Adults! They sustain different injuries and require a different approach to treatment. However, this knowledge is rarely taught in the basic training of health professionals, so not all practitioners have the necessary skills to get your child safely back to sport.
The Kids Back 2 Sport listing is designed to ensure that parents can find an appropriately skilled healthcare professional when their sporty child is injured.
Having a child with an injury can be a worrying time for both parents and children.
There is the concern about what might be wrong, what is the best thing to do and the frustration of the sporty child not being able to do what they want. This site is designed to help support you through the process of getting the right advice and getting children back to sport as quickly and safely as possible.
What causes most childhood sports injuries?
Most child and teenage sports injuries, that do not involve a collision or fall, usually occur when children exceed the current capacity of the muscles, tendons, or bones. They occur when what they do exceeds what they have trained for, or the body’s capacity to do that amount of activity has dropped due to factors like poor sleep, nutrition, or illness.
Are injuries caused by doing too much?
We can all recognise that if we tried to run a marathon without training or went to the gym 7 days a week after an absence of many months, we would be asking for trouble. Children are just the same.
They need time for their body to adapt to what they do. At the start of a season, new sport, or following an injury, holiday, or illness, build children’s sport up gradually. Resist the temptation to say yes to every sporting opportunity, and make sure the child gets the fuel for the sport they do and plenty of recovery and rest.
Learn more about why injuries occur and what you can do to help reduce the risk of injury in your child by downloading our parent guide to “Why do kids get injured” here
How do I know if my child is doing too much?
Think of a child’s capacity to do more like a mobile phone battery or a fuel tank. When it is full, they can run around at full speed enjoying all that they want to pack into their busy lives. However, often present following a growth spurt, or busy times of the sporting year, or when they are tired, ill, not eating enough for what they do, are stressed, or not sleeping well that will drain the battery and with it their capacity to do as much.
Children start to present with niggly aches and pains, they start to get recurrent sore throats, become grumpy (even more so!), their motivation for a sport they previously loved starts to dip and in girls it may delay the onset of their periods or affect how regular their periods are. If they are exhausted and displaying these types of symptoms, encourage them not to go hard and work on a technique rather than fitness. Better still, if they are really exhausted, take them home for an early night and destress with a fun family movie night.
Read about how to decide whether to train or not, how hard they should train and how to boost their battery.
Does growth cause injuries?
Children are more vulnerable to injury during growth spurts. It takes time to adjust to longer limbs and they become less coordinated for a time. Patience is key in giving them time to adapt to their body and learn how to move with longer, stronger limbs.
Growth also creates greater tension and compression at the site where the muscle attaches via a tendon to the bone. A sudden spike in activity can exceed the capacity of the tendon attachment to the bone and causes irritation of the growth plate and soft tissues. This results in pain local to the point of attachment of the tendon, (not the tendon itself) and is aggravated when they run, jump and hopping and settles with rest. These injuries are known as an apophysitis.
Examples of this are:
Heel Pain
Where the Achilles tendon attaches to the heel bone. This is called Sever’s. Click here to download the e-book 'Let’s Talk About Sever’s'.
Knee Pain
Just below the kneecap where the quadriceps muscle attaches to the top of the shin bone. This is called Osgood Schlatter’s and results in pain on jumping, running, kicking, squatting and kneeling. They often get a small swelling over the attachment from the repeated traction forces. Click here to download the e-book: 'Let’s Talk About Osgood-Schlatter's Disease'.
Do children get stress fractures?
It is not uncommon for children to get a bone stress injury (often called a stress fracture), especially during the big adolescent growth spurt when bones get longer, and yet for a short time, the bone is not as strong or able to tolerate sudden changes in activity.
Bone stress injuries are the most common cause of low back pain in sporty children, especially in those who do repetitive sports involving arching the lower back like bowling in cricket, tennis serving, gymnastics and kicking a ball.
The body is clever. In response to a sudden change or spike in activity, the bone gets “bruised” and recognises it needs to make itself stronger. But that process takes a few weeks. During that time, the new, immature bone is more vulnerable to injury.
The child may experience intermittent, niggly back pain, stiffness or an ache on activity, but it quickly settles when they stop. Provided it has time to do so, the bone adapts to the new activity level and the bone bruise settles in 2-6 weeks.
If the pain is ignored, and the bone does not have the chance to adapt, it may develop a small hair line crack in the outer surface of the bone. These are not serious but do require a period of rest and rehabilitation often lasting 4 months. The sooner, we identify the bone is being “stressed” beyond its capacity, the less chance of a stress fracture occurring and the misery of months out.
“Any sporty child with low back pain, should not play with pain and rest for 2 weeks. If they pain recurs, they need assessing by a healthcare professional.”