Tag, you’re gone!

(deep SIGH)

First they took away dodgeball, saying it was too violent. Then a couple of kids fell off the see-saw and monkey bars, so away they went. Next the tall metal slides were replaced by short plastic corkscrews that don’t give you any speed. Before long somebody said that even swings were too dangerous for playground play. Now just when you thought parents and schools couldn’t get any more ridiculous and wussified than they already are, you know what some school board in Attleboro, Massachusetts decided this week? Apparently the game of Tag is no longer an appropriate game. Tag! I mean… TAG for crying out loud! Claiming “Recess is a time when accidents happen,” the Willette Elementary School has deemed one of the most basic, elemental and pure games of childhood as too rough and dangerous for kids to play. What’s even more amazing is that there’s nothing amazing about this decision. Schools all over the country have been taking similar measures for years. In 2002 a Santa Monica school banned the game saying that it “creates self esteem issues among slower and weaker children.”

I just don’t even know what to say about this decision that isn’t already self-evident to anyone who grew up in any previous generation, though I think George Carlin said it best: “Grownups are taking all the fun out of being a kid just to save a few thousand lives. It’s pathetic.”

Every generation fears the one that comes after it. Our grandparents were horrified by the rock-n-roll our parents listened to. Our parents were horrified by the brain-numbing MTV programming we watched. It’s expected. You think your parents are prudes and you wish your kids would be into the “wholesome” things you liked. But now that my generation is stepping into the parental roles a new and disturbing trend is happening. We’re actually saying that all the things we loved about being a kid are no longer good and valid forms of entertainment. Instead, we claim they’re damaging to the body and psyche of our frail little children. But the more I think about it, the deeper I think it goes. Parents aren’t vilifying things that are dangerous. What they’re really trying to forbid is any activity that kids can do without their direct supervision.

I never made that leap of logic until I read that soccer is now the number one youth sport in America. And what immediately occurred to me was that the article left out one key word from the declaration: soccer is the number one organized youth sport in America. Whenever you see American kids playing soccer, it’s almost without exception a structured, organized event with official teams, coaches, referees, and booster moms selling refreshments and car magnets. You almost never see a group of four or ten unsupervised kids trying to kick a ball through a makeshift goal. That’s what kids all over the world do, but not in America. Here, the sport that kids engage in most, irrespective of adult supervision, is basketball. Kids don’t need an organized group of parents to play basketball. As long as they have a ball, a net and a hard surface they’ll shoot hoops for hours. But since there’s no way to poll every pickup game on every cracked asphalt court in the country, soccer is the sport that wins the most popular title.

And that suits the parents of my generation just fine for some reason. They can’t stand the idea that their kids could be having any kind of fun that they didn’t personally orchestrate and supervise. And that’s why things like playground equipment and unstructured games like tag and dodgeball are going away. “Safety” and “self-esteem” are just easy scapegoats for the real truth: today’s parents are scared that their kids (gasp) might not need them.

I don’t know where all this insecurity originated and why it seems to be unique to parents my age. Is it that we wish our own parents would have spent more time playing with us that we feel compelled to make sure our kids never spend a joyful minute outside our presence? Is it the reports of kids getting stolen out of their own yards that make us too scared to let them leave our watch for any reason whatsoever? What is it that makes games like soccer, where dozens of kids can be supervised all at once, more preferable to games like tag where kids can supervise themselves? Why on earth is our generation unique in vilifying ourselves by vilifying the things we used to love? And where will it end? How much of our children’s lives will we attempt to structuralize with no thought given to what we’re depriving them of?