More idiots

I read in Time this week that an elementary school in Attleboro, MA has banned tag- and virtually all "chase" games- from recess. The reason for this prohibition is that kids get hurt playing tag both physically and psychologically. "If one kid were always 'it,'" his self-esteem would suffer. If a child is badly injured his parents might sue the school.

Your dad and mine will likely harrumph when they get word of this story. "Guess what," they will say, "Kids get hurt and their feelings get hurt and they need to learn to get over it." After all, what is the point of recess if not to run around and blow off steam and make fun of other kids, which you can't do as easily in the classroom?

Kids are, in effect, born to hurt themselves. If we as a society didn't have things like cribs and play pens and car seats and those locks for toilet seats there would be kids flying through windshields and tumbling out of their beds and falling into toilets every five seconds. Learning how to walk is a treacherous endeavor fraught with danger. A tot takes a spill every five steps or so. And yet we have managed, as a society, to keep the enterprise of learning to become bipedal out of the courtrooms.

Many a scraped knee result from learning to ride a bike. They sting and sometimes you get gravel under your skin and the knee scabs over and it's ugly. Just ugly. Still, somehow, Toys 'R' Us continues to peddle bikes to parents willing to subject their children to the Monster of Mayhem that is a bicycle.

Surely schools must take extra precautions in deciding what is acceptable playground activity given their duty to make school a safe place. Taking swings off of school playgrounds is reasonable because kids like to jump off of swings from great heights. Banning the Whirling Dervish of Destruction (aka merry-go-round) is also probably a good call if for no other reason than kids puke on themselves if they ride that thing directly after lunch.

But tag? Come onnnnn.

Tag is exactly the kind of game a society with a growing obesity problem needs. Surely there are risks. I once played tag with my cousins in the dark after Thanksgiving dinner. Cousin Karen and I ran smack into each other, resulting in a shining black eye for me and a migraine for her. It sucked, but my tag career was not over.

In fifth grade a boy who was playing touch football at recess fell and broke his arm on the field. One of the bones in his forearm snapped and jutted out through his skin. Everyone crowded around him and kids were screaming, "He's not even crying!" It was unfortunate. It was heroic. It was a game. And he was a kid. Boys continued to play touch football and other kids continued to play tag and somehow we all managed to survive without any tag casualties.

What alternative is there? You can hardly expect to install a track where the playground field lies now and think kids will run orderly laps during recess. I doubt also if hiring a boot camp sergeant to drill kids through calisthenics during the periods now set aside for recess would be wildly popular. If I were ruler of the universe I would decree that tag and other "chase" games are keepers from a risk-to-reward perspective.

As for the complaint that being constantly "it" might damage a kid's self-esteem let me state first that this is a non-argument. At recess games are voluntary. If I were playing tag and were constantly "it" and my little feelings were hurting then I would stop playing tag at recess all the time. Problem solved.

The larger issue of kids feeling picked on in sports at school is a bit trickier. My worst experiences were in junior high when we had square dancing units in PE. My frizzy bangs and tragic fear of boys usually left me in the bottom three or so choices for dance partners. I motherfucking dreaded that week every year. It was painful and I felt like everyone was staring at me and making fun of me or feeling sorry for me. Actually they probably didn't care, and now I think it's hilarious that I got so worked up about it. The point is that I survived and even managed to become a functioning adult despite the psychological trauma that was junior high PE square dancing.

Again, to channel dads everywhere, if we let kids get off without picking teams and getting left out and feeling like losers sometimes we are going to have a bunch of pussy kids running the world in the future. While there would be nothing wrong with a society that had more compassion than does ours, there would definitely be something wrong with a society where everyone thinks she's a victim and requires an oppressive set of rules for every endeavor to protect her self-esteem.

If everyone who tried out for the school play was cast there would be a lot more shitty school plays. If everyone who tried out for the soccer team got to play there would be no incentive for the talented players to train hard since there would be a bunch of crappy players on every team they faced.

We can't protect everyone from everything, and we shouldn't. It's probably a good idea to keep guns out of schools and keep kids off of technical playground equipment involving heights and high speeds, but a good old-fashioned game of tag rarely kills anyone. When I hear stories like this one out of Attleboro I morph into a sixty-year old man on a quest to strike down psycho-babbling soccer moms everywhere.