checking top stories, actor michael madsen was arrested after allegedly getting into a fight with his teen son. officers were called to the malibu home on friday. madsen was charged with cruelty to a child. his son did not need medical attention. hopefully you are waking up refreshed this morning because you are about to lose one hour of sleep tomorrow. it's almost time to spring forward. daylight savings time begins at o'clock a.m. tomorrow morning. don't forget to set those clocks an hour ahead. "your bottom line" starts right now. is football just too rough for growing kids? good morning, everybody. i'm christine romans. some of what your kids are coached to do on the field would be an assault anywhere else as

the national football league is under a scandal for boupttying, we wonder how far down that reaches. some parents this week wonder, hey, does football even belong in school? we asked former new york giants receiver amani toomer. plus, is political rhetoric becoming demeaning, demeaning to women? and four things you can do right now to save hundreds of dollars around the house. but first, that boundy scandal rocking the nfl. players and coaches admit to illegal bonuses for knocking players out of the game. but what about high school players, what kind of message are they getting this week? we're joined by amani tumor, a father and a football lover. at the very highest level of the nfl, we were hoping this is an exception, not the rule. but we know that the competition among kids in high school is incredible. they get stickers on their helmets for sacks, for

interceptions, for all kinds of different things. what kind of message are they getting this week? >> they're getting it's not acceptable. mr. goodell is not going to accept anything that is under board in terms of, you know, the extracurricular hits, anything that goes intentionally to try to hurt somebody. >> as a football player, you might have been like, what are you talking about? you probably wonder about every hit you ever got. yeah, you know, i think back to some different times when i played. i think it's more the exception than the rule because it's so hard to be successful in the nfl. and then to go out and try to do extra damage to another player, it's just too hard. the athletes are too good. >> it's the epitome of unsportsmanlike conduct. it's just horrible. but look at what happened in high school, right? kits want to emulate the players on the field. they want to get out there and they want to win.

is this something we see a hint of in high school? >> gosh, i hope not. i'm from texas football culture. i'm a fare of two boys, which i would not be hesitant to put them into this sport. >> you would put your sons in football? >> i think i would, christine. another thing, i'm outraged ed deficient, by the way. when i see stories like this, my outrage is deficient. i would put them in football, but this gives me a great hesitancy. if violence is a by-product of the game, i think i'm okay with that. but if it's an objective, hurting someone, having it carted out, now i have a problem. >> i've never been in a situation where that was the objective. and every nfl team, high school, college, nothing, it never went to a point where we're trying to injury somebody intentionally. >> the way very quickly people started taking responsibility for this and not trying to push it under the rug, that was

sportsman like conduct in an unsportsmanlike situation. i want to get a clip quickly from the movie "the blind side." >> you protect the blind side. when you look at him, you think of me, how you have my back, how you have his. okay? all right. umpa lumpa is your tail back. when you look at him, you think of sj and how you would never let anyone hurt him. do you understand me? all right. got back. got it? >> are you going to protect the family, michael? >> yes, ma'am. >> good boy. >> i really, really, love that movie. sandra bullock won the oscar for that movie. that kind of aggression is what got him into the nfl, but that aggression makes football a very dangerous game. he's kind of a one in a million exception. you look at all the kids who are playing high school ball right

now or playing high school football. 1.1 million kids. last year, what, 254 people were drafted into the nfl. is it worth the risk? is it worth the risk? is head injury risk, all the different risks out on the field for just a slim shot to be someone like you? >> when you look at the draft and all the players, where they come from and where they're ultimately going, you can't look at the 1.1 million and think every one of those players wants to make the nfl. i think a lot of those players are just enjoying their experience, playing with their friends because i know my experience, i loved playing high school football and two of my closest friends today are still my players that i played high school with. some of them had no aspiration of becoming nfl players. >> the san ra bullock character is interesting because that's about parents and coaches and the breaks on the raw aggression are the adults who are around the kids. in the case of the nfl bounty situation, the gas on the car was actually the people in charge. so this is about parents knowing

the limits to their children. well, but all the people involved in the nfl are adults. the players should be treated as adults. it's interesting you ask about the risk situation. if your goal is to make it to the nfl, it's not worth the risk because your odds are so poor. but you have to ask yourself, i'm sure amani can testify, some sense of team developments, responsibility, leadership, work ethic and weigh those against those potential harms. that's the right calculation to make. it's not whether i'm going to be the next andrew luck, peyton manning. by the way, odds are against you. >> especially when he's sitting right next to you. >> he's pretty big, but not as big as i thought. >> you have to not just look at people that go to the nfl. you have to look at how many people get educated, get an opportunity to get to great universities because of sports and other things, as well. that's another thing that football brings to our community. >> that's right.

>> you also have to be pretty realistic about what it's going to get you, too. you don't want to be that parent on the sidelines who has your kid in seventh grade lifting weights, telling them if they don't win, it's all about winning, winning, winning. there's some pretty fine lines here. >> you don't want to be that parent, but if i find out some kid is getting extra money to hurt my kid on the field, i'll have a hard time staying on the sidelines. >> have you decided that you will now put your kids in football? >> if i move back to texas, i'm sure they will be. new york city, it's a little hard to find it out. i am open to it. >> get to new jersey. we'll find you a place where your kids can play football. thank you so much. one of my next guests says she's more concerned about raising basement boys than kids getting hit hard on the football field. we'll talk about that next on "your bottom line." roc® retinol correxion deep wrinkle night cream. it's clinically proven to give 10 years back to the look of skin.

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tackles. they get stickers on their helmets, accolades and reward, not the same as a cash bounty. but the nfl bounty scandal has plenty of parents saying, hey, this is another reason why football is just too tough for kids. rachel blogs for catholicvote.org. in atlanta, goldy taylor, an independent analyst and social critic. nice to see you. and here on set with me, pete dominick. the four of us combined, by the way, have enough children combined to form a football team. pete, forget the violence and the injuries, all that for a second, football is the most expensive sport. it largely excludes girls. in an era of severe education budget cuts, maybe that's the reason to be talking about cutting it from public schools. some are. >> yeah. i mean, that's a fair point. if we're talking about budget cuts, i think that we might want to cut expensive sports that require the reason it's so

expensive, so much equipment, hockey, lacrosse, football are much more expensive. i would cut football before i would cut music and art and foreign languages if that's the question, but if you take budget cuts out of it, the idea of getting rid of football because it's violent at a very youth level within i don't think we should extrapolate what happens down to fpeewee, that's for sur. >> i asked some of our viewers. one person wrote, football too rough? it's for the guys that can't play hockey. football guys have all their teeth. another one says, the kids these days are just too weak. he followed up with, but hardship might be why the generation before us was great. goldy, some harsh stuff for people to say. we don't want our kids to be coddled too much, but football, especially high school football, it requires grownups, right? referees, parents, coach toes make sure that aggression is channeled into competition and leadership.

>> it does. it requires all of us to get involved. i mean, i have five children. i didn't caudal not one of them. some of them played lacrosse, in some of them played soccer. one ran football for a year or two and others ran track. it was an opportunity for them. my high school football team was -- we didn't have the best equipment, but we had involved parents, involved coaches who saw to it that they were doing the right thing on the field. football in other sports are appear important part of growing children. and my fear is that, you know, despite what some of the reports are coming out about injuries, and i think that's an unfortunate thing that we have to pay attention to, i think my fear is that we are pulling, you know, going to caudal our kids too much. it's a brave, cruel world out there. they have to be prepared for everything. >> rachel, you make a very good point about being less worried about football injuries than about raise ago generation of basement boys. >> i am. >> wa do you mean by that? >> i am. so many kids are in their basements and playing video

games. i think who is going to fight our wars, who is going to save us from burning buildings? i think we're raising boys to be men. i have a 5-year-old son who is a green bay packer fan. today i saw him throw his huge teddy bear up into the air and dive after it because he's playing football with a teddy bear. boys will be boys. i think eliminating peewee sports for kids or even in high school, boys are going to do what they're going to do and perhaps they're safer with the -- >> let me ask you this because i'm curious if you agree with pete, that you would rather -- if you had to make a choice in an era of budget cuts, that football, something that really only boys can do and something that is one of the most expensive things that you can run for a school, you know, football goes before music? >> well, who wants to make that choice? i have a son who is a football player and i have another one who is into football.

i think that's a really unfair choice to make. >> i'll take it back, then. you don't have to make though choice. but it does show you some of the things that people are talking about out there and thinking about out there. but this week in particular, and goldy, i want to go back to you quickly. i hear a lot of mothers rolling their eyes at this nfl story and saying, this is ootd story about football knocking heads together. and saying, what are we doing here? >> kids are going to play. you can take football out of high school and peewee and they'll be like us when we were kids and we'll get out a stick and a ball and make up a baseball game. we will do what we want to do. in the streets, i think it's important to keep the structure in the schools and i think that's just as important. i think that at the end of the day, i think that she's right. kids are going to be kids. we have to prepare them for competitions. my kids respond, they won a game, make a big play, we went to the ice cream parlor. nfl kids are getting paid for it. i think it goes over the line when you pay them to get out of the game.

>> that, to me, we shouldn't extrapolate pro sports where people are being paid, in this case to injury each other, down to high school. >> i think it's an overused phrase, the teachable moment. i hope every coach, every principal, every parent, every quarterback, every receiver in america is talking about how, oh, that went too far. >> but not kickers. >> no. another subject i want to talk about, a topic that caught my eye this week, the treatment of women in politics. a lot has been written about this. women facing a different kind of rhetoric that many say is definitely more demeaning than men. goldy, you say you're not surprised by this. >> i have been called things i cannot repeat on this television set on blogs and everywhere else. i think the language has divulged into something that's untenable. both sides are responsible. sarah palin was hit with this. now we're seeing sandra fluke hit with this. i think it's very, very tough

for women in politics, but we're here, we're here to stay and if our numbers grow, i think unfortunately the language is going to grow, you know, as they attempt to marginalize women who seek positions of power. >> i feel like in modern history, it sorted of started with sarah palin where people were criticizing her for how much money was spent on her clothes. a lot of people kept saying, well, no one is counting how many suits the president has, armani. pete, you have two daughters. how do you feel about the treatment of women in politics? >> it's terrible. it's absolutely terrifying. lots not equate everything. the bottom line is, we should never be calling these women's names, names like this because of what it does. it discourages women from wanting those leadership role, from wanting to speak their minds on issues, whether it's sayre sarah palin.

i've been called lots of names, it's not fwhi gender, it's not about my race. you make fun of my baldness which i don't control. but those things don't hurt. it's not about sexually based insults where those no base for this. >> this argument, i think it's a legitimate argument when people like axle rod are hip accurate kal about it. you can't go on the bill mahr show just because he gave your campaign $1 million and go on the same week that you're making that complaint to a man who is, quite frankly, a masoginist and towards conservative women and the things he's said to sarah palin and other conservative

women i can't even say right now on the air. >> a lot of things have been said to a lot of people that no one can say on the air right now and that is just in itself, in a nutshell, exactly what we're talking about, raising the standard for everyone. everyone, thank you so much. four things you can do right now. four things you can do to save several hundred dollars each month. you can't afford to turn off the tv right now. that's next. americans believe they should be in charge of their own future.

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. as you know, each week we ask you to share your thoughts on the stories you've heard on this show. boy, were you fired up after last week. hu 'eers what you had to say about making teacher evaluations public. linda mcpherson writes perhaps schools should be empowered to evaluate parents and post those ratings too. rosy says teachers have