Is football too violent for children?

Already uneasy about the idea of letting her 7-year-old son Jason start playing tackle football, Elizabeth Giancarli made up her mind when former NFL star Junior Seau committed suicide.

While many of her son's friends are moving on to tackle, he'll be playing another year of flag football.

“I just couldn't put him in tackle football, only because of everything that's been going on,” Giancarli said. “I think that the Junior Seau suicide really hit home, too. So we decided to put him in another year of flag, because the impact is significantly less.”

Giancarli hasn't ruled out the possibility of letting her son play tackle when he gets older. But she hopes he won't want to.

“I hate to take that experience away from him, especially since we all love the game so much,” Giancarli said. “But I just don't know if it's worth it.”

That's a tough thing to say for Giancarli, a Tampa Bay Buccaneers season-ticket holder who drives all the way from the Fort Lauderdale area to attend games. But she's among parents nationwide who have felt compelled to reconsider whether football is safe enough for their children amid a steady flow of reports on the potential long-term effects of repeated head injuries, an ever-growing list of concussion lawsuits filed by former NFL players against the league, and the New Orleans Saints bounty controversy.

Plus, now, the death at age 43 of Seau, a star linebacker for two decades.

Although it is not clear why Seau killed himself earlier this month, his death advanced what already was an uncomfortable national conversation about the hidden consequences of playing football.

And while it is too early to establish a link between parents' safety concerns and football's popularity, there are indications that fewer kids across the country are putting on pads.

Research from the National Sporting Goods Association indicates overall football participation across all age ranges has decreased from 10.1 million in 2006 to 9 million in 2011, with the most significant drops in the 12-17 and 18-24 age groups.

The decline doesn't appear to be a function of school budget cutbacks. According to the NFHS data, the number of high schools offering 11-player football continues to increase.

NFHS director of sports and sports medicine Bob Colgate says the small decline hasn't raised red flags among high school sports administrators and may be the result of normal fluctuation in class sizes.

Dr. Michael Koester, a pediatric sports medicine specialist in Eugene, Ore., who has advised the NFHS, says it's too early to connect a downward trend with parents' safety concerns — but says the numbers are worth watching, especially in youth football.

“I think if we're going to see a culture shift from a participation standpoint, I suspect that we're going to see it more at those lower levels, where parents are going to be deciding there's just no reason for their 7-, 8- or 9-year-old to be out there playing. “And frankly, I support them in that. My son didn't start playing until he was 12.”

USA Football says participation in youth football has been relatively stable in recent years, at about 3 million kids — but USA Football executive director Scott Hallenbeck acknowledges that may change, given parents' concerns about safety.

Hoping to ease those concerns, USA Football — a national organization founded by the NFL and the NFL Players Association — has put safety measures in place in recent years for the youth leagues that have joined its membership. USA Football-affiliated coaches must take a training class and pass a test, then follow specific instructions that include proper equipment fitting, an age-specific approach to teaching tackling and other techniques, and limits on contact in practice.

This fall, USA Football will launch what Hallenbeck believes is the first comprehensive study on injuries in youth football.

“Clearly, there's a concern, and we have been proactive on that for five or six years,” Hallenbeck said.

Former NFL quarterback Kurt Warner caused a stir recently when he said he worried about his own children playing football, but he's not the only ex-pro with reservations. For ex-NFL safety Matt Bowen, there aren't easy answers when it comes to balancing safety concerns against the positive things kids can learn from football.

“But I've had this conversation with my wife quite a bit, and I know in our house, our boys aren't going to play youth football,” Bowen said. “My wife's already taken care of that. That's just not going to happen.”

Bowen, who now writes columns for the Chicago Tribune and the nationalfootballpost.com website, gets a lot of questions from fellow fathers.

“I tell them that I love the game,” Bowen said. “I respect everything I learned from the NFL, and in college and in high school. I don't think there's a better sport out there in terms of teamwork. I really don't, in terms of learning how to deal with some adversity that you deal with in real life.

“But I also tell them I got beat up a lot, had a lot of injuries. People ask about concussions all the time. 'What do you think? What's your stance on it?' A lot of times I just change the discussion. You're out drinking beer with some dads and they ask you, you talk about it a little bit. Yeah, I think it's violent. I think it's violent and I think it's made for young men, not little boys.”

Kia LaBracke experienced that violence firsthand when her son, Nico, sustained a concussion from a big hit he took while returning a punt in a freshman football game in Oconomowoc, Wis., last fall. Nico couldn't remember who his own brother when he got home, and it took him months to recover and return to school full-time, leaving LaBracke and her husband, John, to make a difficult decision: They weren't going to let him play again.

“We knew it was going to be very tough,” LaBracke said. “Because he's very dedicated to the sport, he's a very hard worker. This was his thing. A lot of his identity, who he was and who he is, was tied up in that.”