Bern: The question I asked my husband the first time I went to a kids' AFL game.

The first time I went to an AFL game I remember tugging on my husbands shirt and whispering loudly: “Are they allowed to do that?”

He assured me that they were. That these 7-year-old children were indeed not only allowed to tackle each other, roughly and with force but that it was also actively encouraged that they give their opponents a bit of a “good hearted” shove during play.

I then asked my husband, “But what if he gets hit in the head?” He just looked at me and shrugged.

This, as a mother who has done everything in her power over the last seven years to keep her son OUT of harms way, made my spidey senses tingle. Yet apparently this just makes me “overprotective“.

I’ll admit here, I’m relatively new to the whole “sport as a religion” thing. I don’t come from a long line of professional sportsmen or women or even a family that was remotely interested in sport. However, that didn’t stop me from attempting to integrate my first two children into the soccer/netball/karate/softball scenes at various times during their lives, although mostly without success.

My third child, in contrast, is a totally different animal. It was like he was born kicking a football, with the game of AFL now consuming his every waking hour and thought. Which brings me back to the headgear, or lack thereof.

As a fresh set of eyes on my son’s first Under 9 AFL match, my first instinct was to be both alert and alarmed at the potential danger. Especially when there’s precedent.

Recently, 13-year-old Jarrod Fletcher was left in intensive care after he received a head knock during an NRL game that left him unconscious for an entire minute on the field. When he recovered, he was allowed to play on but collapsed not long after and rushed to the hospital. Which raises two questions: Why was he allowed to play on in the first place? And, secondly, why wasn’t he wearing headgear? His mother, Kellie Erwin, has been asking the same questions and has called upon the NRL to make protective headgear compulsory for all players.

Jarrod’s injury came only two days after 16-year-old Tyler Horton received brain surgery when he was kneed in the head during a Bathurst Rugby Union game.

These are kids! It is so incredibly frightening, as a parent, to think that your child can be irreparably damaged or possibly even killed doing something they love that should be, with the right care taken, a relatively safe practice.

So why in all contact sports, in 2014, isn’t headgear compulsory? I asked this of one of the fathers I was standing next to at the game a few weeks back and he had this to say.

“Once they play professionally, they won’t be wearing headgear so they shouldn’t get used to it as a child. Furthermore, they look terrible, you don’t want your kid to be all self-conscious about how he looks on the field, he won’t play as well.”

All I heard was: ‘you stupid woman, me smart man, stop questioning things.’

This of course didn’t deter me. I went on to say that maybe if these kids started to wear them now, at a young age, that by the time they were “playing professionally” they’d be so used to it that no one would even question it. Also, I pointed out, if they were all wearing head protection, as an added bonus, they’d also have a better chance of you know, NOT DYING.

He blinked.

Furthermore, I said to him, if it is compulsory for our children to wear a mouth guard during play, are you basically telling me that children’s teeth are more important than their brains? That he couldn’t answer and admitted, the whole thing didn’t make a lot of sense. Ya think?

Here’s the thing, everyone understands that accidents happen. But if we can attempt to minimise the risk in our daily lives, why aren’t we trying to do so where we can clearly identify the risk in sporting situations? Why aren’t we yelling loudly from the rooftops to make headgear, for all children, for all sportsmen and women, compulsory?

Do you think we need compulsory headgear for kids playing sports?