Your Child Just Had A Concussion
What Parents Need to Know When Their Child Has a Concussion
A parent who’s kid just had a concussion often have a number of questions and are often concerned about what recovery will look like.
It can feel overwhelming to navigate your child’s healing especially if it’s their first concussion. While concussions are common enough, proper management is essential to ensure a full recovery.
To Clarify,
A concussion is a brain injury caused by a hit to the head or body that makes the brain move inside the head, commonly from sports in kids. As a result helmets do a poor job at preventing concussions and some of the technologies and features are best at reducing the severity of them. Concussions temporarily affect how the brain works as the tissues and nerve pathways are recovering, leading to symptoms like headaches, dizziness, and trouble concentrating.
An important note is if you or anyone SUSPECTS a concussion during a game or practice pull the kids out from playing anymore, the consequences of having two concussions at the same time are astronomical.
In kids, it is often expected to take most kids one month for symptoms to resolve and longer for a full recovery of their brain because they are growing. That being said 1 in 3 kids can take longer than 4 weeks to recover and often need specific treatments unique their symptom presentation. It’s incredibly challenging to avoid longer recoveries but we can minimize the consequences with early rehabilitation.
What is Normal After a Concussion
Each concussion is unique, but your child may experience:
What Parents Should Do in the First Few Days
Relative Rest
For the first 24-48 hours, your child should take it easy and spend less time doing things that make symptoms a lot worse, such as screen time, being in loud spaces, and high-intensity activity. However, complete avoidance of symptoms and hiding away in a dark room is outdated advice and can actually slow recovery. It is possible that they man need to take a few days off school.
Often it’s not necessary to go to the Emergency or Urgent care unless your kid starts to experience severe symptoms especially in the first 4-6 hours after the injury. This article can help guide you for when you need to be more concerned and take your kid to the hospital ASAP.
Sleep is essential while they’re recovering, especially in early stages, keep them on a regular routine and let them sleep as much as they need.
X-rays, MRIs or other imaging techniques unfortunately won’t tell us anything about the state and severity of the brain injury.
Gradually get back to light exercise and back to school
After the initial rest period, your child should slowly get back to gentle exercise. Light movement (like short walks) and brief periods of screen time or schoolwork can help recovery and blood flow to the brain
By the end of the first week, we want to start getting them back to short school days and build from there.
Often there’s a dance that has to be done to find the balancing point of different activities with a reasonable amount of symptom irritation, a physio can help you navigate over the month of recovery.
We want to prioritize getting back to school before going back to sports and make sure we set up supports with teachers to help your child succeed and minimize the risk for them falling behind in school.
