UPDATE: TAG HAS BEEN REINSTATED!
HERE’S A NOTE FROM THE SCHOOL DISTRICT ON ITS WEBSITE!
District responds to concerns about tag
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ORIGINAL POST:
The Mercer Island School District outside of Seattle has banned tag because it is too emotionally and physically dangerous to kids.
In fact, it has banned all games in which kids do not “keep their hands to themselves.” In an email note to Q13Fox TV, the district’s communications director, Mary Grady, wrote:
“The Mercer Island School District and school teams have recently revisited expectations for student behavior to address student safety. This means while at play, especially during recess and unstructured time, students are expected to keep their hands to themselves. The rationale behind this is to ensure the physical and emotional safety of all students.
“School staffs are working with students in the classroom to ensure that there are many alternative games available at recess and during unsupervised play, so that our kids can still have fun, be with their friends, move their bodies and give their brains a break.”
Maybe it’s time for the district to give its own brains a break. If tag is so dangerous for mind and body, we have certainly been slow to recognize its menace. An analysis of the Pieter Brueghel painting, “Children’s Games” shows Dutch kids playing about 90 different games, among them: Tag.
Date of painting: 1560.
So once again we have an age-old childhood tradition that is suddenly too dangerous for THIS generation of kids in THIS country. How can it be that for 450+ years (and possibly since the beginning of time), kids played this very same game, but this generation is too fragile to handle it?
Because, as psychologist and author Peter Gray so often reminds us: There is no other era that has ever so underestimated children.
What’s more, our rule-makers do it with a condescending smile that says it is for the sweet children’s sake that we treat them like bonsai trees — delicate, beloved, in need of constant attention…
And stunted.
Stunting has become the job of many bureaucrats, making sure kids don’t get a chance to develop the physical and emotional skills they need — by protecting them from the physical and emotional “dangers” they hallucinate everywhere. Even in tag. – L
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64 Comments
Like the Immortal George Carlin predicted, soon all kids will be permitted to do is stand around staring at the ground, during recess. That is, of course, until one little prince or princess’ foot falls asleep while standing still, and their parent sues the school for the trauma. That will end the fun activity of standing still for generations to come.
I’d almost rather they had banned tag and called it a day. It’s salt in the wound to then promise to work with the classrooms to make sure everyone survives the ordeal. Tag is too emotionally wrecking, no tag is emotionally wrecking…
“The cause for concern, the school district explained, were some ‘isolated incidents of unfortunate interactions that occurred on the playground where students were injured and some stemmed from games involving student contact with each other.'”
In other words, it’s another instance of those “in authority” (sic) not exercising authority and having the guts to handle the situations like that and make tough decisions. Heaven forbid those who are actually causing the “isolated incidents” are taken to task and disciplined for them — it’s much easier to make blanket prohibitions.
It’s about time that a school gets sued for causing anxiety disorders in a child by falsely telling that child that just about anything is dangerous.
“This means while at play, especially during recess and unstructured time, students are expected to keep their hands to themselves.”
You mean like in straight jackets?
I have visions of recess children running and body slamming each other in their straight jackets but AT LEAST THEY KEPT THEIR HANDS TO THEMSELVES.
In better news, they are teaching all kids how to ride bikes in 2nd grade in DC.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/all-dc-public-schools-students-will-learn-to-ride-a-bike-in-second-grade/2015/09/23/22a0b356-6203-11e5-b38e-06883aacba64_story.html
Just yesterday I threw my kids outside because they were getting under foot. I heard complaining that they were cold, so I told them to play tag to warm themselves up. Guess I should prepare for some emotional and physically trauma.
And yet..I suspect that when they become middle and high school students…they can STILL play football. A game that can cause real damage (brain damage) and they still allow it. But, you know, I predict that their team will not win any games once this group of kids reaches the age of playing. Because you know, they will have had it ingrained that they cannot touch each other.
You should refer back to an early article you did a couple of years ago: https://www.freerangekids.com/almost-incomprehensible-recess-policy-kids-must-trudge-like-prisoners/ because clearly that’s where it’s all heading.
Oh, and here’s a nice summary on the Fourth Turning by Strauss and Howe which explains why we’ll have about another 10 years of this nonsense. Hopefully, we’ll survive it. http://www.angelfire.com/or/truthfinder/fourthturning.html
the result of the ban is that some of the kids who had been playing during recess are no longing playing but instead are walking about talking about video games . . .
Those hand clapping ‘patty cake’ games the girls play – BANNED
we’ll have about another 10 years of this nonsense
Just in time for my mortgage to be paid off :-/
History’s patterns are abundantly clear in retrospect, but forecasts are notoriously unreliable. Just when you think things can’t get any worse, they do, or don’t, or stay the same, or things go sideways.
Lenore had this interesting post a while back about the demise of childhood culture in Britain. For centuries, kids passed on games, songs, folk lore, monster hunts and such to younger kids who kept it alive. Now, not so much. If I find the story, I’ll post the link. People, kids too, crave culture, contact and communication. When authorities try to shut down a particular avenue of culture, it almost always pops back up in strange and unintended ways. If you ban tag, something else will come up to take its place, and it likely will be more “subversive” than the activity that was banned.
Here is the link to the story about the demise of children’s culture in the UK:
http://carcinisation.com/2014/10/04/the-last-of-the-monsters-with-iron-teeth/
There is a reason that, of all the characters in the Harry Potter series, the most hated is not Voldemort, but Umbrage. Because most kids in the years the books have been popular have had to live with condescending bureaucrats like her having power over their lives. Someone who knows little to nothing about children or teaching, yet is given the power to overrule the discipline of stern, respected, teachers of long experience. Someone who (trying to work the quote from memory), “talks to them[students] as though they were 5, rather than 15.” Someone who tries to “protect” students from actually trying the skills she is supposed to be teaching, because they would be “too dangerous,” yet then turns around and intentionally causes the students actual harm. Someone who always has an excuse to take away anything that is enjoyable . And who does it all while claiming it is because she “cares” so much “for the children.” But really she wants control.
@Roger the shrubber
“Those hand clapping ‘patty cake’ games the girls play — BANNED”
and to think that in the late 70’s, early 80’s we played those hand clapping games while swinging upside down from the monkey bars. . .
We played a game we called Foot Hockey. Played with a tennis ball, our feet, and boundaries defined by our coats thrown on the ground, including the goal posts. Sort of soccer with a tennis ball. In grade 3, playing this at lunch, two of us collided. We weren’t even going for the ball, just focused on what was going on, didn’t see each other. We both went down, and unfortunately my friend got the worst of it. Weds. trip to the hospital with a broken collar bone. He was back in school on Monday, arm in a sling. No punishments handed out, and no ban on playing Foot Hockey.
Could you imagine the over the top reactions should that happen today?
As for the comment below on football injuries. I have always said that going into any sport you know and accept that their is inherent risk of injury. Certain sports have injuries that are common to that specific sport. Now should those sports be banned are we going to eliminate injuries? No, they will be replaced by injuries that these active kids will incur doing whatever activity they replace the sport with. Like life there is no safe sport. Trust me been there done that. At my age, my friends and I all have aches and pains each and every morning. And we can tell you when, where, how, and why each body part aches. And not one of us regrets any of them.
I am reminded, as I often am by posts on this blog, of the immortal CS Lewis quote:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
Considering that students in some schools have been reported to play butt-tag, I can understand why some people might be concerned. What could be more dangerous than children touching each other’s buttocks?
Having a hard time believing my eyes. There’s no way we have adults running that school system. I have come to the conclusion that progressives are either pure evil or the deviously mentally unstable. Perhaps both. Parents have to stand up and fight for their children or they will become nothing more than indoctrinated drones with no common sense or self restraint or moral enrichment. All of which are indeed the responsibility of public schools to encourage and enforce. If you have a teacher or school authority that doesn’t agree don’t stop until that person is no longer part of your school system. It is your child’s constitutional right as well as yours.
In addition to butt-tag being unsanitary, there is the danger that some children might experience the contact as overly stimulating, and then require years of expensive and painful sex abuse counciling to overcome the trauma.
Some of my best memories growing up was dodge ball at recess, I learned to compete, got my exercise, learned to shake things off and laugh when I missed catching the ball or taking a hit. I guess that’ll be next on the ban list.
I teach 2nd grade. I told my aide about this. She cringed and said she would hate to be the one on playground duty trying to stop kids from playing tag.
“School staffs are working with students in the classroom to ensure that there are many alternative games available at recess and during unsupervised play, so that our kids can still have fun, be with their friends, move their bodies and give their brains a break.”
Acceptable games include: Silent walking in a circle, Ball bouncing (no throwing/catching allowed), and meditation.
I wasn’t a big fan of dodgeball. I was slow and after the third grade I had a weight problem. (This was more of the fact that cheap food was heavy in sugars and carbs and my parents were on government aid. I played all the games the skinny kids played. Touch football, kickball, baseball, etc.) I was the kid that got ostracized due to the fact that I didn’t run as fast as the others and was one of the first to get hit. I’m sure there were other reasons, but that’s the most relevant to this discussion.
Anyway, even though the games were unpleasant and I was almost always the first to get tagged and thus tended to be ‘it’ a lot more than the others, I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything in the world. Even though I wasn’t popular after third grade (I was slowly excluded from all the cliques), fourth and fifth grade tag games made me feel like I was part of the group anyway. When I finally got someone after half the recess of being ‘it’, it was such a triumph that I felt good the rest of the day.
David
“The result of the ban is that some of the kids who had been playing during recess are no longing playing but instead are walking about talking about video games . . .”
There was a news story a few weeks ago about a school that had gone on lockdown. Some kids were overheard talking about guns and shootings. Turns out they were talking about a video game. So all non-school related talk should now be banned as well.
All talk but no real threat results in lockdown. Tag isn’t the real danger in schools. Talking is.
http://www.nj.com/somerset/index.ssf/2015/09/hillsborough_high_school_lockdown_lifted.html
Children are now basically viewed as plants… immobile and incapable. Put a bucket over a plant and see what happens. That’s where we’re headed.
I don’t understand when injuries became such a giant big deal. Kids get hurt, no matter what you do. They’re SUPPOSED to get hurt. Try to mitigate to prevent injuries that could be life threatening or might lead to paralysis, anything else is just part if growing up.
I see this all the time, parents getting between kids because “someone might get hurt!” As if the world will end if someone gets a little boo boo. As the mom of a 4 year old wildboy who lives to crash and battle and otherwise rough house, it makes me so sad how often he’s stifled because someone might fall down. The horror!
“School staffs are working with students in the classroom to ensure that there are many alternative games available at recess and during unsupervised play, so that our kids can still have fun, be with their friends, move their bodies and give their brains a break.”
Don’t call Recess unsupervised free play and have school staff tell the kids what games they can play. This is the opposite of free play.
And the nonsense about giving the brains a break-children learn more about social skills and interactions at recess than during the highly controlled school day. The two most important periods of the day, in my opinion, are lunch and recess. Social skills, problem solving, leadership, and empathy are taught during these two critical periods of a school day. It is emotionally dangerous to cripple these developing skill sets in young children because school administrators are catering to they helicopter parent lobby who thinks Tag is the new Gluten and must be eliminated.
“The rationale behind this is to ensure the physical and emotional safety of all students.”
Read, the physical and emotional safety of students whose parents coddle them, complain and eventually sue.
W. T. F.?
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And better they learn to get hurt and even experience accidentally hurting others at young ages where a serious injury will be rare. They’ll learn their personal limits and how to rein themselves in as necessary. Better a hurt 7-year-old than big, burly high schoolers who don’t know how to control their bodies hurting each other.
I guess that puts an end to school-sponsored football?
(Fat chance. Parents would likely take up torches and pitchforks if any school district tried to ban football.)
What about dodgeball? best game ever…. If you dodge a wrench you can dodge a ball.
Tag is an awesome game recess game!
It requires skills in starting, stopping, and changing direction as well as speed and agility. Games of tag engage the brain with critical thinking and decision making- players have to analyze space and avoid being tagged.
What alternative games do they have in mind?
Wii Recess?
Let’s be Mimes?
This really has nothing to do with safety. These bureaucrats may have brainwashed themselves and their employees into thinking it’s about safety, but really it’s about keeping their jobs. Telling an angry, out-of-touch-with-reality parent “they were just playing tag” gets you nowhere but in court, and then the spineless school board or superintendent fires you.
The primary responsibility here lies with entitled, stupid parents. And I don’t mean ‘stupid’ in the generic negative sense of ‘I don’t like them’ – I mean they’re actually stupid.
Baseball must be banned for anyone under 18. Kids are actually “tagged out,” and that us harmful.
How many times over the past few years have we heard a school rep. state in an interview, “Our primary goal is to keep our students safe.”.
Personally I would prefer their primary goal to be educating the students. After all teachers spent years and thousands of dollars to become educators, did they not?
It looks like the policy was rescinded. It looks like the very vocal and organized opposition to this idiotic policy actually made a difference. So take heart: sometimes the bureaucrats listen.
http://www.mercerislandschools.org/site/default.aspx?PageType=3&ModuleInstanceID=14772&ViewID=7b97f7ed-8e5e-4120-848f-a8b4987d588f&RenderLoc=0&FlexDataID=34195&PageID=11459
@Paul-
Thank you for that link. I especially love reading, “Tag as we know it and have known it is reinstated.”
This reminds me of the movie Footloose when dancing was banned. So glad it they officially reinstated a worldwide childhood game that’s been in existence for centuries. Yeah for progress.
“Chasing games” are banned at my kids’ elementary school. I seriously think it’s all about the liability issues. So silly.
And who says adults can’t learn and benefit from “consequence of actions”. Fire with fire. It always forces institutions like this to rethink their stand.
“What should we be more worried about? The very few and rare incidences that occur, through no ones fault, and deal with a handful of parents concerns? Or the vast majority that we are going to piss off because we are catering to our own needs and the few students and parents, as well as bad publicity that makes us look like complete morons?”
Like my pops used to tell me, “no matter how old we get, we are ALWAYS learning”. Right you are dad, right you are.
The only time tag is emotionally wrecking is when one kid slaps the heck out of you and the teacher doesn’t see it but sees you when you smack them right back and you’re the one who gets scolded.
I personally found the new note rather gracious. And I’m not entirely opposed to teachers and administration being involved with recess activities as long as they’re helping rather than hindering or taking total charge. Hooray for the change!
I’m pondering over Vicky’s odd comments. Is someone experimenting with a type of comment-bot that puts out vaguely related right-wing talking points, in the hopes of improving it until the comments seem relevant? Is Vicky actually multiple people playing out some odd contest about who can work the most conservative tropes into comments? Is Vicky a liberal playing some sort of practical joke? Inquiring minds want to know.
I’ve been in contact with the district’s superintendent. They have realized their mistake and reversed this policy. The restrictions have been removed. Score one for common sense.
My Dad tells a story about he and his pals in fifth grade. They invented a game called “Train” which involved them lining up and each child holding tight to the waist of the child ahead of them. The first child in line held their arms out straight in front. They would then run around the playground at top speed. One day after some rain they were running on the asphalt pad. Dad was second in line. The line charged right into the glass window of a closed door. The boy in front sliced his arms up and Dad got glass in his face, not his eyes. The School Nurse called her Mother and the two of them pulled glass out of both boys applied topical medicine and sent them home with a note.
“So I hear you had a big day huh Junior?”, Grandma asked. No one got sued. No one got in trouble. Life went on. Nether Dad or the other child had any physical or mental scars. ” Train” wasn’t banned. Life went on. Dad raised eleven impetuous kids of his own. Served his Country in the U.S. Army and drove a truck for thirty years. Life went on.
The only tiny caveat I have is the idea that “school principals and teachers will work with our students as they imagine and develop new games for play.”
It’s funny how one sentence can have completely different meanings to different people! I took their sentence to mean that kids will work with the principals to show them (the principals) the new games etc. they have developed.
The principals then can see what harmless shenanigans these kids are capable of.
I moved to Wyoming, not knowing all the wonderful, traditional values.
As part of the end of the school year, the police play dodge ball with the middle school students.
DODGE BALL!
This is fantastic news – good on the school (or is it group of schools? ) for seeing sense ☺. I wish our kids would play tag….they’re so into dodge ball and general smacking into walls that the unco teacher (moisture ☺) lives in fear, LOL.
Out of interest, do any of your kids play either smacking themselves into the wall or Jackie Chan-style running up it? That seems to be the latest craze among our senior boys (9-11 year olds ) – just seeing who can be the most macho, and make the loudest bang, hurling themselves at a wall.
So far we leave them to it…..not much funnier than machismo in action ☺.
Not to go all James on you, Lenore, but wouldn’t that be Bruegel, and is it correct to call those kids Dutch if you consider they lived in what is Belgium nowadays??
@Hineata: YouTube link please? >:-D
Dear Lenore and the ‘Free Range Kids’ community,
This blog is a very useful resource, but it seems to be a magnet for dodgy individuals. Please eject the individual ‘sex hysteria’, he is a pedophile apologist who not only thinks that pre-pubescent children can consent to sex with adults, but also claims that child rape is harmless (based on a cherry-picked academic paper that has been discredited by other academics as having seriously flawed methodology).
See, for example, his latest blog post on Jaycee Dugard (http://www.donotlink.com/gt0a), where he writes:
“The victim only admits that being isolated and deprived of social contact, she was naturally glad to get occasional visits from her captors. Is that the whole story? Considering the cultural context of political correctness that prohibits acknowledgement of sexual desire and sexual pleasure early in life (especially in girls), it would be surprising to hear otherwise. On the other hand if a rape victim is already sexually dysfunctional, as most women are today (2), then we should not be surprised if the sex was not pleasurable. Nor should we be surprised if a sexually dysfunctional woman who is raped blames her lack of pleasure on the coercion rather than her pre-existing sexual dysfunction.”
also:
“There is good reason to believe that some mothers set the stage for a negative reaction to even minor sexual abuse”
He is saying rape (including the rape of an 11 year old girl) should be pleasurable, and that any woman or girl who doesn’t experience sexual pleasure during rape is ‘sexually dysfunctional’.
I never got injured playing tag as a kid, but I did fall down the stairs and break my foot once as an adult, and I’ve never heard of stairs being banned. Also, I wonder how many of these “tag is dangerous” schools have adopted yoga programs, as many schools have done? I love yoga, but to be honest, I’ve injured myself doing yoga countless times, so it makes no sense to ban one physical activity that isn’t 100% safe, and replace it with another activity that isn’t either. Really, no physical activity is 100% safe, but kids (and adults, for that matter) need to move regularly, so if I saw kids choosing to play tag outside, instead of Candy Crush on their screened devices, I’d encourage it, and only intervene if they were hurting each other. Anyway, I’m glad the powers-that-be reinstated tag, but banning it in the first place was unnecessary.
@Papilio – darn, wish I could ☺. But, while we might not be paranoid about physical injury – boys will be mor…boys! – we are paranoid about putting their stupidity on the net. I suspect it has more to do with fear of what might appear at a 21st than nutters abducting them ☺.
@Hineata: But there are filters for that! 🙂
I took a break from FRK for a while, because it was depressing to read so many stories that make me sad for the future of our children. I came back, because I want to “fight the good fight”. At least this story gives me some hope that people are fighting back. A stupid policy got reversed because of push-back from what I”m reading into the story. If that’s the case, I hope this becomes a trend.
I don’t know how they were even planning to enforce this. Kids just run, period. If you take away tag, they’ll make up something else.
School paranoia news:
The opening of a new gun store in McLean brought out angry parents and neighbors with signs and bullhorns. It’s not so much what they’re selling as it is where.
Nova Firearms on Chain Bridge Road in McLean is the largest Virginia gun shop inside the Beltway. The problem for some parents, neighbors, school and political leaders is, see that building so close by? It’s an elementary school.
“I’m very concerned that they chose to put a gun store in the backyard of a grade school,” Delegate Kathleen Murphy said. “I think it’s an outrage.”
http://www.wusa9.com/story/entertainment/mcfly-report/2015/09/26/hundreds-protest-firearms-being-sold-by-school-in-mclean/72882942/
I realize that some people do not approve of guns, or say we have too many guns. But elementary school kids cannot buy guns on their lunch hour. What’s the problem?
P.S., I don’t know what game the kids in the picture are playing, but it sure doesn’t look like tag. Tag doesn’t involve knocking other players down to the ground; it’s just a one or two-handed touch, depending on what version you’re playing.
Oh, George, really?
George, I think some parents actively look for things to get themselves riled up.
George,
Had it been a new car dealership the parents would not have said a word, yet cars kill more kids than guns.
“I realize that some people do not approve of guns, or say we have too many guns. But elementary school kids cannot buy guns on their lunch hour. What’s the problem?”
What about all these schools with “resource officers” i.e. cops in school? They carry guns.
You should be a part of a contest for one of the most useful sites on the internet.
I’m going to recommend this website!